Dry Hops After Freezing?

[khumbu76]

Hi everyone.

I did a search in both the forum and interwebs and couldn't find the answer to this one:


My neighbor invited me over to harvest a couple lbs of Cascade hops a couple of weeks ago (which was super-cool of him!) Unfortunately, I did not have time to dry the hops before I had to head out of town. They are currently in ziplock freezer bags with as much air squeezed out of them as possible. I know this isn't ideal, so I'm wondering what my next step should be to keep them as fresh as possible over the next 6 months or so.

Should I take them out of the freezer, properly dry them, vacuum seal, then re-freeze them?

-or-

Immediately transfer to vacuum sealed bags, then refreeze?


--or--

Just continue to keep them stored as is and try to use them all over the next six months?

Thanks all!

 

[growabeard]

What did you end up doing @khumbu76?

I harvested a crop yesterday and filled a 5 gallon bucket but can't use them for a few days so I froze it all. I surely hope my whole season of work isn't down the drain. I've been reading claims that Vinnie from Russian River uses frozen wet hops, but I can't find the original article or post to know if it's real or anecdote.

 

[OleBrewing]

i suppose how you want to use them. some make wet hop beers using fresh picked cones straight to kettle. i imagine with not being dried could add some green leafy taste. only homegrown hops i have used for bittering were columbus and then they were not added til half hour in the boil. otherwise just for flavoring.

never used wet hops.

would just leave them be but calculating bitterness etc by weight would be tough with wet hops

 

[mashpaddled]

I would be concerned about drying them after freezing. Seems like they would break down into mush as they warm up and it would be hard to dry them well. I could be wrong.

I've heard of people using frozen wet hops and don't see why that would be much of an issue. Might be messier but should taste fine, especially if they are frozen in a chest freezer rather than a normal defrosting fridge.

 

[growabeard]

Ok so to report back:
I ended up with 1440g of wet hops that were frozen. From that I packaged up 840g into vacuum sealed bags to try out a few "fresh" hop batches in the future.

I dried out the remaining 600g of frozen wet hops on a screen for roughly 24 hours in a dry basement. They weren't mush and they didn't fall apart too much on the screen. This ended up being 154g of dried hops, separated into 28g bags. They smelled delicious and I'm getting really excited to use them in future batches!