Whole leaf vs. Pellet

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

ISUbrady

Active Member
Joined
Apr 13, 2016
Messages
26
Reaction score
0
Would like to start off, I am new to brewing, I have successfully brewed 2 batches, with another ready to be bottled.

I was toying around the idea of buying some rhizomes to attempt to grow my own hops. When I found out one of the local breweries was giving away a cascade rhizome to anyone in the area, but the catch is that you have to bring in the 1st years harvest and they will make a communal batch out of it and you get to be at the tasting of it. So once I found that out I felt obligated to.

The question that I have though is pertains to the whole leaf hops, from what I have seen so far is that more whole leafs hops are needed than pellets due to the surface area and the length of time it the wort takes to reach the lupulins I think.

Then I read how pellet hops are made, which sounded like there were essentially ground up and pushed through an extrusion die to form the pellet shape and then stored I believe.

So I was thinking, would it be possible to break up or grind the whole leaf hops to increase the efficiency of them?

Like I said I am new to brewing and I haven't ever posted a thread before so I am also new to that. Thank you to anyone that might be able to shed some light on this.
 
If you are growing you own hops, you are basically using "FRESH/WET" hops. They are not the same as commercially produced dry whole hop cones. The dry ones you cna buy online can eb used in a 1:1 ratio with pellets per weight.

Your fresh hops will have a decent amount of water in them so you have to account for it. It really depends on the harvest itself, but ive seen 3:1 as a recommended ratio for using fresh/wet hops.

The main consideration is - absolutely DO NOT waste these fresh hops in a bittering or even mid boil addition. Fresh hopped beers are nearly in their own sub-category due to the unique flavor the hops impart when they are so fresh. For anyone that gets their hands on some freshly harvested hops, I would definitely recommend using them in either a dry hop addition or a whirlpool addition
 
No m00ps, if you are using fresh wet hops, you are using fresh wet hops. If you are using home grown hops, you usually dry them first, so you can store them. Home grown, does not equal 'wet'.

Running them through a pellet mill is not about making them more efficient, so you can pretty much skip grinding them up. Hops are pelletized to make them more compact and easy to handle and weigh out in quantity. To an extent, it also minimizes the surface area available to oxygen, to cut down on the oxidization of the Lupulins and other compounds. You can store a great deal more pounds of pellets in a given volume of freezer space, compared to whole leaf hops. And you don't need to balance a laundry basket on top of your scale to hold a pound of pellets.

Try not to over think this. Talk to the supplier of the rhizomes and ask if they want the hops wet, and they will dry them (likely) or dried, and go from there. Lots of purpose built drying rigs out there, but a window screen in a warn dry place will do nicely.

TeeJo
 
Thank you for the help.

I guess I should have specified first that I plan on drying them using my dehydrator and then vacuum sealing them for longer storage.

Is there an advantage to using fresh wet hops as to dried whole leaf hops?

The supplier wants them right after harvest fresh wet hops, but I am trying to figure out what I want to do with my personal harvest.
 
My plan for all of my first year rhizomes this year is to dump every last cone, picked as fresh off the bine as possible, into a flameout addition. Just for funsies.

Sure I've got 5 varieties... but since I have no way of knowing what the alpha acid content is, I don't intend on using them for bittering, even after they've been established.
 
Would like to start off, I am new to brewing, I have successfully brewed 2 batches, with another ready to be bottled.

I was toying around the idea of buying some rhizomes to attempt to grow my own hops. When I found out one of the local breweries was giving away a cascade rhizome to anyone in the area, but the catch is that you have to bring in the 1st years harvest and they will make a communal batch out of it and you get to be at the tasting of it. So once I found that out I felt obligated to.

The question that I have though is pertains to the whole leaf hops, from what I have seen so far is that more whole leafs hops are needed than pellets due to the surface area and the length of time it the wort takes to reach the lupulins I think.

Then I read how pellet hops are made, which sounded like there were essentially ground up and pushed through an extrusion die to form the pellet shape and then stored I believe.

So I was thinking, would it be possible to break up or grind the whole leaf hops to increase the efficiency of them?

Like I said I am new to brewing and I haven't ever posted a thread before so I am also new to that. Thank you to anyone that might be able to shed some light on this.

Get three or four rhizomes if they will let you have that many and grow them for the first year brew. After that start messing with chopping up the leafs to increase yeild but I double you'll get any more. If anything you'll notice more of a change in beer volume batch to batch between using whole leaf vs chopped up leaf and you'd have to have them rested to know AA% to calculate IBUs.
 
No m00ps, if you are using fresh wet hops, you are using fresh wet hops. If you are using home grown hops, you usually dry them first, so you can store them. Home grown, does not equal 'wet'.

rawr
 
[...]So I was thinking, would it be possible to break up or grind the whole leaf hops to increase the efficiency of them?[...]

That was a different way of asking a question I've seen a posed few times before.

It seems to be a given that hop utilization - that is to say, the extract - improves modestly when using pellets vs whole cones.
So it wouldn't be unreasonable to suspect that grinding up homegrown cones would improve the extract as well.

Having harvested quite a few pounds of hops over the last five years, my suspicion is there'd be significant lupulin loss incurred in the grinding process that the modest utilization improvement (generally accepted as around 10%) could be totally lost - and then some.
Lupulin sticks to everything - and I could see a mill being jammed up with the stuff with the user contemplating the value of scraping as much off as possible.

It's one thing for a commercial producer to take that hit - he's going to run another thousand pounds through the mill.
It's another thing for someone producing five dry pounds to take the "tooling loss".

SO, I'm going to go with "Don't bother"...

Cheers! :)
 
Awesome thank you, everyone has been very helpful.

I am growing 2 cascade, 2 nugget, and 2 centennial. 1 of the cascades is the breweries that I will have to give my first years harvest to but after that it is all mine.

I like the idea of brewing the day of or close to they day of harvest and using them at flameout.
 
Wet to dry ratio is established at either 4 or 5 to 1. When I dry my cones, I am shooting for at minimum 4:1 drying ratio. So, if I have 4 to 5 lbs of freshly picked wet hops, I want to end up with 1 to 1.2 lbs of dried hops out of my oast. If they're less than the 4:1 ratio, they stay in the oast.

When you use fresh hops vs. dried hops, use the same ratios. So, if your 10 minute addition is 1 oz of dried leaf hops, you'd use 4 or 5 oz of fresh or wet hops. Don't freak out, it's still the same physical amount of matter you're throwing in, your just accounting that there is still water in the flowers.

You can still use your homegrown hops for bittering additions, it is just understood that your IBU cannot be accurately calculated, as you can't determine the AA without expensive testing. I assume the low end of the range in the hop variety. So, if cascade is 4-7% AA, I assume 4 in my recipe. If it's 7, great, if it's not, oh well. I'm not going to label or commercially sell my beer, and bitterness usually ends up right where I want it. Many people will just use a commercial hop for their bitter additions, which is totally normal also.

I agree with day_trippr on the grinding of your hops. Yellow sticky lupulin gets everywhere. I suppose maybe you could use a blender and fill it with hot wort to help combat stickyness and lupulin loss, but that is a lot of extra work and a grassy tasting sludge. All that fine matter then in your wort, like hop pellets, gunking up your equipment. Toss them in the boil and let the roll of the boil work them in. You can then use a strainer to scoop them out before you chill.
 
Between m00p and daytrippr, they pretty much hit it on the head. Hops are ground up to reduce volume, prevent oxidation and (modestly) increase utilization. Its also done to make clean up of the kettle MUCH easier and reduce wasted wort that would have been soaked up in the whole cone hops being thrown out.

You could try grinding your own but bad things will happen:
  • The grinder will be covered in sticky lupulin. We use rubbing alcohol to clean all our equipment at the end of processing.
  • If you don't use the hops immediately, they will rapidly oxidize and you will get nasty by products. From the moment they are ground in the hammer mill, we keep them in a blanket of nitrogen gas to keep out O2.
  • Your grinder will probably grind it too fine. We grind to something close to confetti than sand.
  • Hop powder is hydrophobic and won't mix well unless the wort is at a boil. Think hot chocolate powder in cold milk.

One of our first years, our pelltizer took a dump. So we delivered a brewer bags of freshly ground mill powder. It did not work well at all.
 
Back
Top