by LeithR » Thu Aug 14, 2014 08:07
A while back I had a contaminated brew after dry hopping a batch of my home brew. I eventually put it down to the bag not being properly sanitized. I had boiled it before use but possibly not for long enough. This experience coincided with my introduction to hop pellets, I noticed that they were effectively hop dust compressed into a pellet. So I took this thought to the next stage and tried blitzing them myself, I find hops, possibly due to the high oil content to be very sticky once they have been pitched and a bugger to get off your hands and everything else they touch when cleaning up.
My approach so far only practiced at the dry hopping stage is to take an amount of hops, my last attempt was to use 40g of Galaxy hops in a Youngs Harvest Bitter kit, Ive also done a couple of brews with 50g of Citra hop tea. I blitzed the hops using a stick blender and put the dust into my pre-sanitized 1L stainless steel double skinned cafetiere, I then poured boiling water over them and left them for 30 mins to mash. After pushing down the filter I poured the tea into my brew leaving the hop residue in the cafetiere. I have done this on 3 occasions and always when I transfer the brew from the initial FV bucket after the Krausen has settled into my airlock FV.
Each batch has turned out really well and has gone down well with my tasters (Wife, Son, Daughter in Law, Daughter and her Boyfriend)
On my next AG brew I plan to blitz all the hops at each required stage, I'm convinced that this approach will intensify the hop extraction. It may even require me to reduce the amount of hops used in a batch on the basis that too an intensive bittering for instance is not to my taste.
I'll report back on the next stage of this experiment.
Last edited by
LeithR on Tue Nov 25, 2014 16:47, edited 1 time in total.
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- LeithR
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- Location: Kemnay, Aberdeenshire