Extract session IPA with homegrown hops

[SHAIV]

I got over 4 oz of hops from my hop plants.
First harvest from June I got
.7 oz cascade
.5 oz chinook
Then I just cut down my cascade because one of the bines dried up and got
.3 oz dried up cascade (still smells good, lost its color)
2.1 oz cascade (after drying)
About 10 cones of centennial lol!
And I still have about .5 to 1 oz of chinook still on the bines

I have 6 lbs of gold malt extract from northern brewer
Using s05 yeast

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What do you guys think? Any changes? I don't really want to add more malts. I want it to be hoppy and low abv. My buddy has some more homegrown hops not yet picked. he said he might could add some to it. I said maybe move some of my dried hops to a dry hop and use some of his fresh hops in the boil but if I add more hops I feel like I'll want to add some dme which I could do I have 2 lbs of dme as well but I'm doing extract because of time constraints and going to his house to pick his hops will take up time I don't have

 

[cactusgarrett]

I would get what you can and use them as dry hops, as i don't see any mention of that. Dry hopping, to me, is important in a session IPA. It creates complexity and prevents the beer, being lighter in nature, from appearing thin or one dimensional.

 

[SHAIV]

Ok yeah I thought about that. I think I just didn't want to lose wort volume to the hops. I could take the 2.1 oz cascade and move to dry hop or the first two additions half oz chinook and .7 oz cascade? Also I haven't decided what do you think about either a 30 min boil with 10 min whirlpool instead of a 40 min boil?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Hops straight off the bine have all sorts of delicate flavour/aroma compounds that are lost in drying, so where possible you want to use them as wet/green hops. But they are incredibly fragile, they will go off within a few hours at room temperature. Freezing, particularly vacuum packed, is probably the least bad way if you have to store them, but I know commercial brewers who will start the boil and then go out to the hop farm to pick up their green hops.

By the same logic, you want to use green hops on the cold side - either whirlpool or dry-hopping - unless you have so many that you can spare some for the kettle. Oh and obviously you need to allow for the water content, depending on the harvest you need about 7x the green hops as dried hops.

 

[cactusgarrett]

Ok yeah I thought about that. I think I just didn't want to lose wort volume to the hops. I could take the 2.1 oz cascade and move to dry hop or the first two additions half oz chinook and .7 oz cascade? Also I haven't decided what do you think about either a 30 min boil with 10 min whirlpool instead of a 40 min boil?

I think you could easily pull 1-1.5oz Cascade off that 10 min addition and get the same result. Gotta remember, this is a smaller SG beer, so you don't need to go as big with the IBU as you would a normal SG beer. At least, that is if you're looking for balance (which I tend to favor in my IPAs).

 

[SHAIV]

Thanks for the info! I wanted to wet hop this batch but some of my hops dried out and I needed to pick the cascade so I dried it. I can pick my chinook while the water is heating maybe and put them in at flameout and do a whirlpool after a 30 min boil

Oh and I don't really care if it's balanced. I want a hop bomb! Lol

 

[SHAIV]

So here's some eye candy for y'all. I'm really excited to taste this fresh hop session IPA I think it's gone pretty good. I ended up doing a longer boil because we were chilling another IPA and it took a while to chill because it was like 90 degrees outside so I did a standard 60 min boil

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I ended up picking the rest of my chinook at around flameout and I dumped them in at about 193 ish then just added some more wet hops yesterday it was about 7 oz or more wet weight it was a mixture of chinook, cascade and centennial. Hard to get all those whole hops to touch the liquid! lol

 

[Morrey]

Awesome!

 

[SHAIV]

Thanks man. It's the first time I've wet hopped and it's gonna be very sessionable at about 4.2% It's also gluten reduced with clarity ferm to fit the parameters of "gluten free" it's my first time using that also. My wife's cousin is gluten intolerant

 

[SHAIV]

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This is gonna be pretty dark. Brewers friend put this at a 4.12 srm. I think it's gonna be a bit darker than that right? Anybody got a guess? Do you know how to tell? Is it just by comparison?