First Harvest Ale

[funkenet]

Hi

Ok I want to do my first harvest wet hop beer this weekend but I have a few questions. First, I only have 4.5oz of Chinook and 8.5 oz of cascade and negligible amounts of saaz, fuggle, sunbeam, and vojvodina. This is obliviously not enough to do a wet hop beer so, should I dry them out or supplement the recipe with store bought hops? Second, if I supplement with store bought hops should use a high alpha hop at 60 mins for bittering then throw the wet hops in in the last ten minutes to get the most out of the fresh hops, or should I use the wet hops throughout the whole boil?

[Bugeater]

Since determining the IBU contribution of homegrown wet hops is a crap shoot, use them at the end of the boil. Use your commercial hops for the major portion of bittering.

Last year our brew club did a wet hopped big brew. This was a 120 gallon batch. At the end of the brew we dumped 30+ pounds of freshly picked hops into the mash tun and recirculated the hot wort through them for about 5 minutes before chilling. We had some animated discussions about whether this would cause oxidation but we were too drunk by then to bother doing anything about it. We ended up with no oxidation issues at all. Was a pretty tasty beer.

Wayne