Beer Forum

First post here and i have a problem. I have made the same recipie 4 times and it has always been very consistant. The fifth time i brewed this beer i used a different type of hop bag. I think the bags were too small because when i fished them out they were full and thight like the wort wasnt able to flow through them. So just as i feared when i sampled it after force carbing it was very sweet almost no hops at all. I was thinking about venting the keg down and unscrewing the preasure relife valve to add some sort of hop tea. The problem is i have never made hop tea. Should i follow the same hop schedule with plain water or just the bittering hops or something else?

I know that i will not be able to replicate my original recipe i just want to get it drinkable. Thanks for the help.

A simple steep should be enough to get the bitterness you are looking for out of the hops... if you were to do a 60 min boil with water and hops, you'd end up extracting all kinds of other nastiness out of it. Leaf are gonna work easier for you.

"Hop Tea" is your best bet. Boil the hops in water for 20 mins to allow isomerization. Otherwise if you just want flavor / aroma you can dry hop, but I don't think that is what you are after.

The hop tea I made was with an ounce of Centennial in a thermos with hot water poured over and capped. I let it sit about 15min before pouring off the liquid. The resulting tea was too bitter for me to be able to drink straight, and I'm definitely a hop head. I haven't done a boiling to extract hops, but I'd have concerns about extracting other compounds that one might not want (but can't say that the same won't come out of the steep). Either way, I'd recommend pouring a sample of your beer and dosing the sample to get an idea of how much you would need to add of your tea to bring it to where you want it.