Beer Forum

I would like to try making several smaller extract brews this winter. I did this a couple of times last year, the biggest problem is in order to get the correct bitterness I would have to do a 60 minute boil (or in some cases shorter increasing the hop quantity). I would like to try and maybe make a hop tea, boil it down so that I can divide it up equally into bottles. Then when brew night is upon me this winter, I can steep some grains, add the appropriate number of bottles of hop tea to get the desired bitterness, add the malt extract and be able to have a shorter boil time. I am thinking with this method I could do a small brew indoors after the kids are in bed cutting out the usual mashing and reducing the boil time.

Does anyone see any problems with this? Anyone try this or anything similar?

Thanks for the input.

they already make hop extract that is probably a million times easier to use than trying to make your own.
http://morebeer.com/view_product/7835/1 ... tract_1_oz
hijack: do you have to boil this stuff for 60 mins if you are using it as a 60 minute replacement? it says its already isomerized so i would guess no.
edit: it says you can add it to already finished beer to adjust bitterness so i just answered my own question.

Yeah, I saw those. But between the $35 and having to use a pippette or drops. I figured maybe I could make my own that would be a little easier (ie. one 12 oz bottle of tea will add XX amount of IBU's). 12 oz. seems easier than 1.25 ml.

gibsale wrote:I would like to try making several smaller extract brews this winter. I did this a couple of times last year, the biggest problem is in order to get the correct bitterness I would have to do a 60 minute boil (or in some cases shorter increasing the hop quantity). I would like to try and maybe make a hop tea, boil it down so that I can divide it up equally into bottles. Then when brew night is upon me this winter, I can steep some grains, add the appropriate number of bottles of hop tea to get the desired bitterness, add the malt extract and be able to have a shorter boil time. I am thinking with this method I could do a small brew indoors after the kids are in bed cutting out the usual mashing and reducing the boil time.

Does anyone see any problems with this? Anyone try this or anything similar?

Thanks for the input.

Kind of funny I was considering doing this too, just for a completely different reason, primarly just to screw around with something. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a bad idea. I was going to do this with a 2-3 gallon boil, and lots of my leaf hops from 2007 (I'm making room for the 4lbs of pellet hops that I just got), boil it until really low volume (1/2 Gallon or so). I have no idea what I would do with it after that point. Bottling doesn't sound great because of the 02 exposure. flush the bottles with CO2 maybe? Damn I think I just talked myself out of this. What a bad Idea. Let us know if you go through with it. Just know that those recipes will be insanely unrepeatable. I don't know which would be worse, a really bad beer or a great one that you can't repeat.

I agree bad idea. Just do a quick extract batch