Beer Forum

I'm planning a series of lambic brews and, unfortunately, didn't start planning two years ago like I should have. Anyone have any old hops lying around that they want to get rid of? Of course I'd prefer something in the noble varietals, but anything could work if it's been aged long enough.

Cheers!

Order them from Fresh Hops, look under Lambic Hops:
http://www.freshops.com/cgi-bin/shopper ... egory=HOPS

I have gotten lucky asking my LHBS guy and he just happened to have some nasty aged hops that he gladly gave me. Ones that he never ended up selling for whatever reason.

Yeah my LHBS has skunked Cascades I bought for a song....

Another good place to get lambic hops is the 7 Bridges close out hops page. I once bought some whole leaf 2% AA Belgian Saaz that were 4 years old. Old, low-alpha, Belgian...perfect for lambic. They have some on the website now, but don't know exactly how old they are:

http://www.breworganic.com/closeouthops.aspx

rhino777 wrote:Yeah my LHBS has skunked Cascades I bought for a song....

Careful with those. We used some ~5 year old cascades that were also baked in an oven for a while to make sure they were done and we still ended up with about 25 gallons of too-bitter lambic grapefruit bombs. 2 years out I'm still holding on to hope that the bitterness will eventaully fade...

are you pitching bottle dreg/lambic blends? or actually putting your wort outside to be inoculated by whats floating around in the air? If it's the former, just go with super low alpha hops. Other than the tannic quality you might extract from a massive aged hop charge, the only other important quality is antibacterial which doesn't really matter if your pitching clean cultures. Think about it.

If you're aging your own hops, can you only use whole hops or can you use pellets?