Can hops/alpha-acid be made ahead of time?

[olie]

In a separate thread [Here], I explore whether or not a 1 hr wort-boil is really necessary. This question is related, but different.

Part of every recipe seems to include * Add XYZ hops (A%) at the start * Add ABC hops (B%) after 20 min * add LMNOP hops (C%) for the final 20 minutes (or some variation).

I'm curious if one can boil 1 oz of X% hops for Y minutes in, say, a qt of water (like: on the stove), then just save that water + hops acids in a jar (does it freeze?) then add it to the wort later. "Later" as in "next month" (does it keep?)

For that matter, it seems one might be able to make a sort of high-IBU extract, then just add the appropriate amount (do the math!) come brew day.

...Or is this totally insane?


NOTE: I'm happy to do the experiment in some small batch & report back; just curious if anyone has blazed the trail ahead of me, so as to save me some time (and potentially ruined beer)


Thanks!

 

[bpgreen]

That won't work the way you want. plain water won't extract the hop oils the way wort will.

 

[Lefou]

For best results and a good foam stand, you need some sugar and protein content for the best utilization of your hop oils.

 

[Kent88]

I'm all for doing crazy things like putting rhubarb in my saison and leftover whey from homemade mozz in a sweet stout, but this one puzzled me. Not really because I didn't know if it would work, but because it isn't immediately obvious why it might be helpful.

You'd just be changing the date that the boil would be occurring. The boil is going to happen, whether it is for 15 minutes or 90 minutes, unless you're making a no-boil kit. It is likely you'd actually be increasing the amount of energy invested in boiling.

Might it improve extraction of hop oils? It looks like you'd need more than plain water. Even if a brewer could get proper (or even improved) extraction from boiling in water I can't imagine it would work well enough that it would be worth the effort of boiling and saving, unless maybe it would be for extract batches, boiling immediately before the extract is added (but still, why not just add the extract). I guess I also don't think of hops as being terribly expensive. I make 1 to 3 gallon batches and never make IPAs or hoppy pale ales so I usually have plenty of hops left over after brewing.

Might it reduce the amount of boiling you do after a mash? There might be a few hurdles to using this in an all-grain environment. You'd have to use this as strike or sparge water if you wanted to make a high-gravity beer because topping off before the boil would dilute it too much. How would it react in a mash environment, with active enzymes, various mash times and temps, probably a lot of aeration, etc? Even with anything but extremely light beer you'd have to increase the amount of grain you're working with to compensate for topping off.

There are already pre-hopped malt extracts that extract brewers could use if they absolutely want to have homebrew but don't want to boil for a long time.

So while I'm curious and I'd love to encourage you to run and experiment, I can't see how this would change how I brew. I can't speak for anyone else, but I haven't encountered many people around here who I believe would change how they brew whether it would work or not.

But then again, maybe I'm just being narrow-minded / short-sighted.

If you're determined to run the experiment, good for you and I wish you a lot of luck, and I look forward to reading about it. Perhaps it would be worth it for you to look into how these (and these) are made?

 

[olie]

First, I'm not so much against the hour-long boil, just that, while sitting there waiting for it to go on (plus waiting for the water to come up to boil!) my mind starts noodling over such things. So it was really more of a curiosity. As I mentioned in the other thread ("why 1 hr?", linked at top of this one), I'm mostly just curious to (a) understand if anything special happens with boiling for an hour and (b) sort out which things are important parts of the chemistry of brewing from which are "cut off both ends of the ham"-type things because that's how great-grandpa used to do it.

So it's all just learning.

(Like: today I learned that boiling hops in water is less effective than boiling hops in malt-water -- so there's some of the chemistry-stuff I mentioned. Thanks! )

Anyway, I'm not so sure that there's any big advantage. Maybe just that brewing is a many-step long-ish process and so being able to separate out bits of it to other times when it is convenient for the brewer might help make brew-day a bit less hectic. That is: imagine that my idea did work. So, some evening while you're watching a movie on NetFlix and don't feel like prepping the entire brew kit, you can boil up some high-IBU hops in a quart of water (which comes to a boil rather quicker than 5 gallons!), put it in a mason jar, label and store in the fridge. Later, on brew day, say you're making a lower-IBU brew, so you only add a pint and, since it's already been boiled, you can just toss it in near the end, just in time to stir and finish. Heck, you could put it in at the very end and it could contribute somewhat to wort-cooling.

...Like that. My mind was just wandering and wondering. It does that. It seems that homebrew is pretty well covered on the internet, so looking-up the "normal" stuff is pretty easy. So most of the questions I ask here are likely to be off the wall and "how come nobody does it this way?" type things.

"Because I'm a rebel"

Thanks all for your patience! I'm not in a big hurry to run this one (I do want to do my CO2 experiment [LINK], as soon as I procure force-carbonation gear) but, when I do, I'll report back.

 

[JKenshi]

I'll throw my two cents in for no apparent reason...

You can buy hop extract, so it is possible, though, as others have already stated, probably not with just a water boil. And while others have asked the "why" question, I would ask, "where's the fun in that?"

I kind of like the whole process of brewing, including the when and why of adding ingredients (it comes from the same place as my joy of cooking). To me it's like doing magic.

Even if it's possible, a time saver, and a benefit, I think I would just prefer doing it the old fashioned way. To me there's an element of brewing that links us to the past (another thing I'm fond of)... a connection to our ancestors in the pursuit of an ancient tradition.

 

[Yooper]

Here's the thing- only so much hops oil can be isomerized in a volume. So, if you use, say, 1 gallon of wort (or water) to boil your 60 minute hops, and even if you use a ton of hops, you can get at most about 80-100 IBUs in that wort before the wort is saturated. So, when you use your 1 gallon of 100 IBU wort (again, not likely as it's more like 80, but it makes the math easier), and add 4 gallons of 0 IBU (unhopped) wort, your total is 20 IBUs in that batch. That may work for a light lager or other light beer, but not for many other beers.

If you want to skip a lengthy boil and still want to have the proper amount of bittering hops, you'd have to use hop extract.

 

[olie]

JKenshi: I share your "love of cooking". As it turns out, I'm not much of a beer drinker (I enjoy it now & then, but a 6 pack used to be about a 2 years' supply. Even now that I'm brewing, it's still a few months ), so I'm TOTALLY in this hobby for the cooking & chemistry aspects of it.

...But I have other interests ("too many" some with "too little" imagination might claim! ), among them "what can be done?" There's also a bit of "if every single person is telling me X and I don't understand why, I'm going to start asking about Y & Z".

But that's just me.

I'm unlikely to brew any hops-separately batches except in small qty as an experiment, but another thing I like to do when I set out on an experiment is to ask the experts (or at least the Old Guard <G>) what they think my expected outcome will be.

So, in those regards, y'all have been very helpful.

Thanks!

 

[helibrewer]

Hop extract still has to be isomerized. There are pre-isomerized extracts available but these are generally used commercially to adjust bitterness in finished beer.

 

[Dcpcooks]

Hop extract still has to be isomerized. There are pre-isomerized extracts available but these are generally used commercially to adjust bitterness in finished beer.

I’ve used iso alpha extract which while expensive, allows you to add it post boil and post fermentation to adjust bitterness in a finished beer. It’s pretty cool stuff.

There has to be a way to extract the acids from hops sans brewing but I don’t know the answer.

I suspect some form of distillation is required

 

[Miraculix]

Here's the thing- only so much hops oil can be isomerized in a volume. So, if you use, say, 1 gallon of wort (or water) to boil your 60 minute hops, and even if you use a ton of hops, you can get at most about 80-100 IBUs in that wort before the wort is saturated. So, when you use your 1 gallon of 100 IBU wort (again, not likely as it's more like 80, but it makes the math easier), and add 4 gallons of 0 IBU (unhopped) wort, your total is 20 IBUs in that batch. That may work for a light lager or other light beer, but not for many other beers.

If you want to skip a lengthy boil and still want to have the proper amount of bittering hops, you'd have to use hop extract.

From my experience, this is correct.

I just want to add that sugar and proteins are actually decreasing the capacity of the water to extract ibus. The highest amount of ibus extracted per volume of water is when using distilled water.

This "sugar is necessary to extract ibus" is nothing but a myth. Brewed plenty of beers utilizing hop teas without any sugar inside.

For example, the brewers friend calculator takes this into account. The lower the og for the same amount of wort and hops, the higher the extracted ibus.