Mystery Hop Ale - Need Recipe Help

[Brew Engineer]

Well, I finally finished brewing, and got everything cleaned up. It's kind of a pain doing a 5 gallon batch with all whole wet hops!!! My kettle was 1/2 full of soggy hops, and I had a hell of a time transfering to the carboy!

I did take some pictures, and will try to post them tomorrow.

[Brew Engineer]

Ok, so here's some pictures of my Fresh Hop Brew Day. I would recommend in the future, only using fresh hops for the aroma additions, as the hope material gets out of hand quickly!

Here's my bag-o-hops, approx. 2 lbs. I used about 1 1/2 pounds for the beer.



Here's a measured weight of hops.



And hops boiling in the wort! Yum!!



Here is me trying to transfer to the fermenter. The hops clogged up my ball valve, and I had to use the siphon, which also had difficulties.



About 4 gallons of bitter wort collected:



And all my leftover hop material... yuck!



We'll see in a few weeks how she turns out!!!

[DannyW]

Wouldn't the amount of hops in the kettle at the end of the boil be just about the same whether you used wet hops or dried hops? Seems like the dry ones would just rehydrate during the boil and end up looking the same.

That kettle looks about normal to me for a pale ale with mostly whole hops. A big IPA can leave them 6" deep! I used to use a lot of whole hops before I put together a Jamil-o-chiller, so I got used to seeing kettles like that.

[Brew Engineer]

Maybe I'm just used to pellets, but all those wholehops were a pain for my kettle set up.



She's fermenting away in the basement, smells a little grassy, but we'll see how she turns out!

[DannyW]

Put a stainless or copper chore-boy scrubbie on the end of that auto siphon when using whole hops and you can probably drain that kettle dry.

[HopRunner]

I harvested my hops this weekend. I'm pretty sure they are Cascades.

I put them in this round dehydrator that my wife has for drying fruit and all these bugs came out of the hop cones. Little green caterpillars and a bunch of these super tiny spider or ant looking insects. The heat of the dryer seemed to drive them all out and I guess that is good. I am going to use these hops but only as bittering hops. None of these are going into the pot with anything less that 10 minutes left to boil. I vacuum sealed them and stuck them in the freezer.

I'm not sure what to do about the bugs in the future. Anyone else have this problem?

[dmtaylor]

I get lots of little bugs (mostly spiders and spider mites) in my hops. I dehydrate the hops plus bugs at about 130 F for 90 minutes so they're all dead by the end of it. Certainly nothing crawling around anymore, they become crispy critters. You can't even see them anymore after they're dead, they must just shrivel up into nothing. So what if you get some tiny little spiders in your hops? That's life. I don't worry about it. And neither does anyone else. Commercial growers don't kill the bugs either. Do you think there's any bugs in the hops that you buy at the store? You bet your life there are bugs in there. Don't sweat it, you won't die from eating 0.01% crispy critters, and you won't be able to taste them either.

[Brew Engineer]

So I tasted the Mystery Hop Harvest Ale this weekend. I'm going to let it sit for a while longer before I really start into it, but it was interesting.

The Mystery Hop is rather spicy, and gave my pale ale a lager-esque flavor. I think this hop would be better suited to a light lager, or probably a California Common style beer rather than the American Pale Ale I tried. I think I'll try a Mystery Hop California Common next fall.

The beer didn't end up quite as cloudy as I had feared either, and I was able to avoid most of the sediment when I racked it. I definitely want to send it in to the Session and get their opinions on it, so when its ready, I'll be contacting Shat!