Question about making hop tea

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JamesJ

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I just bottled an extract IPA batch that is supposed to be hoppy and the instructions said to make hop tea that gets slowly added to the bottling bucket along with the priming sugar while racking. The instructions said to boil 1 1/2 cups of water and steep the supplied dry hops in a hop bag until the hop tea reached room temp, which I did. When all was said and done the hops absorbed a lot of the water and yielded only about a half cup of hop tea which I added to the bottling bucket. It didn't seem like much so I thought I would ask how some of you go about making hop tea and how much water you usually start with and end up with as tea.

This extract recipe is supposed to be along the lines of a 90 minute clone but was an 80 minute boil. The sample I tasted (before adding the hop tea) was ok but was less hoppy than a 60 minute which surprised me. It had a very mild hop flavor. Hopefully the tea will add to that. Thanks
 
your generally not going to get exactly the same conversion of IBU's when you use this method because in an actual boil where you add them to your wort, theres more volume to absorb the Alpha Acids(bittering compounds in hops) than in a small volume of water. Take a look at this thread:https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/big-hop-flavor-1-3-hops-55721/


So if just going for flavor try like I do on my https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f66/fat-owl-pale-ale-55221/ and save some work. Steeping the hops after flameout really seems to lock the flavor in. (I don't know why.) When I first saw this idea on another site I was intrigued and it does work IMHO
 
Hop Utilization Page

who knows. Personally i have never had issue and if i ever come up light in the hop dept i compensate by dryhopping straight into the carboy or bucket. It does produce different effects, but even though it only adds aroma it still comes across as percieved bitterness....only issue is they DO absorb copious amounts of beer leaving a smaller volume of finished product. Using pellet hops vs whole leaf will cut down on this but then you have the issue of filtering them out somehow...
 
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