How long until all the acid boild off of the hops?

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grathan

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Does this take only a few minutes? Is it meaningful to boil the vegtable matter for 60 minutes if the resin has departed?
 
The alpha acids don't boil off. They isomerize and dissolve. This gives you the bitterness that you're looking for. Most people who really study this sort of thing say that 60 minutes is about all you need, although going up to 90 won't hurt anything.

It's the essential oils - those oils that give you wonderful aromas and flavors - that boil off. Anything over 30 minutes boil, and maybe even over 20 minutes, is excessive for those compounds. Dry hopping lets you capture even more of the essential oils that really build a strong aroma.
 
So the Lupulin glands don't burst and leak the resin which would get isomerized while free floating?
 
So, if I understand you correctly, you're not asking about the alpha acids boiling off (in the sense of converting to volatile compounds that would then leave the boiling wort), but rather about the alpha acids separating from the hop cones (so that you could, in principle, go ahead and pluck off the glands and throw them into the boiling wort by themselves without needing the rest of the hop cone)? What are you hoping to gain?
 
No, not plucking. I am wondering if the boil somehow does this work before the 60 minutes is up. Basically looking to free up room in a hop spider for later additions.
 
I use pellet hops, so the glands have already been destroyed mechanically. So I'm not certain that you can get the hops out early. I think that you'd be giving up some flavor if you did. So it seems to me that the thing to do would be to run an experiment or two to see what effect removing the hops early has on the resulting wort and beer. Maybe after twenty minutes, then after forty minutes, and see where that goes.
 
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