fresh hop/wet hop failure

[kcinpdx]

I attempted my first fresh hop beer and, while it is a very tasty amber, it has nearly zero hop flavor or aroma. I used 3 oz Magnum (dried) for bittering and the following wet cascade additions:

3 oz fresh picked Cascade at 20 min
2 oz fresh picked Cascade at 15 min
2 oz fresh picked Cascade at 10 min
8 oz fresh picked Cascade at 0 min

any ideas of what went wrong and how I can help it?

 

[tdoft]

I'm pretty much in the same boat. My fresh hopper is also lacking hop flavor. I imagine it comes down to the difference in weight of wet v dry hops. If you take the divide by five formula (wet hops are about five times heavier than dry) to your recipe you can see that it may be you just didn't add enough. For example if you usually do a 2 oz flameout addition for flavor that would approximately equal 10oz of wet hops! I'm trying to compensate by dry hopping the heck out of it but I may resort to hop tea...

 

[tdoft]

I looked at your numbers....that really should have been enough. So I'm not sure what happened. Maybe your hops were harvested too early?

 

[knightbeer39]

I just did one:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f69/knight-wethop-ale-196113/#post2287211

preliminary results are very promising. Mine has a lot of hop flavor. Now I did some amarillo and centenniel to start out, then did the Cascade wet hops. But its very hoppy in the secondary right now.

 

[cyberbackpacker]

How mature are the plants that the cascade came off of? Have you used the cascades dried in any recipe yet?

 

[KayaBrew]

Just a guess here, but fresh hops weigh much more than dried hops, so even at the amount you used, it's possible that it just wasn't enough. My buddy gave me an entire plastic shopping bag full of fresh Cascades last year, and when I dried them in the dehydrator, they only weighed out to 1.5 oz.

 

[piteko]

The hops could be not mature enough and anyway their aroma will be based on how healty they grew (light exposure, nutrients, water etc). There are many ways to determine maturity, but if you want an aroma-related way, you can make a hop tea and see if a good aroma comes out.

Happy brewing from Italy!
piteko

 

[kcinpdx]

Well, I may have picked the Cascades too early. In any event, I dropped 1.25 oz of whole leaf Citra and 1.25 oz Amarillo pellets in the keg. I'll check it in a few days and see what I have.

 

[samc]

Well, I may have picked the Cascades too early. In any event, I dropped 1.25 oz of whole leaf Citra and 1.25 oz Amarillo pellets in the keg. I'll check it in a few days and see what I have.

The way the weather has been in Portland I don't think it was easy to get fully mature hops this year. At least at my house!

I wound up with 2 pounds of grassy Cascades. A pound of buggy rotting Centennials and 1 oz of nice Magnums. Think I am done growing hops.

 

[chumprock]

Maturation as mentioned above. I have also heard of 5:1 ratios of wet:dry.

For example, my wet hop IPA I made two weeks ago:

4oz 60 min
5oz 20 min
5oz 15 min
5oz 5 min
6oz 0 min

But I had 8 lbs. of hops harvest, so I went kind of nuts.

 

[piteko]

I have also heard of 5:1 ratios of wet:dry.

Yes, I confirm that too: in normal conditions, the cone has 80% of water in it. If you dry it, the best moisture condition is 8-10% of the complitely dried weight so, e.g., if you have 10 pounds wet, the complitely dried hops weight 2 pounds and you aim to dry them to 2 + 8%= 2,16 pounds.

So if you make 5:1 you are not so far from the perfect weight.

BTW, this is however the normal condition: a rainy period can change the starting weight... The only perfect calculation comes from taking a part of your hops and dry it completely, so you can see how much moisture there is in your wet hops.

Cheers from Italy
piteko

 

[tdoft]

I dryhopped with pellets-1oz Cascade and 1oz of Citra. Its tasting and smelling pretty good now but I'm still temped to add a hop tea of my own hops to finish it off.