Making a hop tea for dry hopping

[Money]

I was listening to a podcast of basic brewing radio, in it they suggested if you're going to dry hop with say an oz of leaf hops, put them in a small bowl and steep them for about 30 seconds with warm water(not hot). Then pour the water and hops in your secondary and rack on top of it. What do yo think?

This was also suggested by an older fellow from England whose in the hop manufacturing field(on the podcast).

 

[pkeeler]

Seems like a lot of effort. The water would have to be boiled, then cooled to warm. Pouring wet whole hops into a carboy seems even more annoying than adding dry whole hops. Maybe they would go down a funnel easier, but I doubt it.

To me, steeping is something different than dry hopping (they call it dry for a reason). But that is done with much hotter water and will extract different oils and kill others. I find it hard to believe that putting the hops in warm water for 30 sec. would extract any more volatile oils than would come out in the 7 days in the beer.

 

[Money]

That's what I was thinking. I didn't know if anyone had tried it.

Guess that's why they call it dry hopping

 

[HairyDogBrewing]

Here is a discussion about a similar technique.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/big-hop-flavor-1-3-hops-55721/

I've done this but never dry hopped, so I can't compare the two.
Seems to give good flavors and not much mess.

 

[Danek]

Here is a discussion about a similar technique.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/big-hop-flavor-1-3-hops-55721/

I've done this but never dry hopped, so I can't compare the two.
Seems to give good flavors and not much mess.

Re: that thread - for what it's worth, somewhere deep in that thread, I did a side-by-side comparison of dry hopping and making a hop tea, and I really thought the dry-hopped version was better. Or to present it more accurately, I thought the hop tea version was worse. The hop tea beer (which was steeped for much longer than the method described for the BBR podcast above, so those guys may have a better technique than the one I used) had a sort of cabbagey vegetal taste to it that really wasn't good at all. It wasn't a dominating off-flavor, so you could ignore it, but compared to the dry-hopped version it was definitely a flawed beer. I really didn't find anything in the hop-tea beer to suggest it was an idea worth pursuing. Perhaps by steeping the hops for a much shorter time you get some kind of benefit that makes it better than dry-hopping. But I've not come across any evidence to support that idea. And dry-hopping works great, so I figure there's no point risking off-flavors by trying a less proven technique.

Though as always, we'll never know for sure unless people try it out.

 

[david_42]

The warm water might help by re-hydrating the hops so they'll sink faster.

 

[GHBWNY]

Sorry, wrong thread.