Hop Uses

Here you can read about:
  • Brewing with your dried hop cones
  • Wet-hopping your ale
  • T-hopping your ale
  • Making Hop Pillows
  • Hop Garlands
  • Cooking with your hop plant! 
To brew with your hop crop you have two lovely options, to dry your hops and use them whenever you wish, provided you store them correctly, or, far more exotically, to brew using wet hops.

If you’ve read this far, you probably either know how to brew beer, or really want to. Try an all-grain recipe, or use unhopped malt extracts. Don’t waste your precious prize on a homebrew kit. If you’re short on inspiration, there’s a recipe page available here.

Brewing with Dried Hop Cones:

You've picked, dried and stored your hops correctly, and now it's time to brew with them. Add them exactly as you would in an ordinary ale recipe, either First Wort Hops, or in the mash tun (you crazy diamond), or at the beginning of a 60 minute boil. Or even towards the end, for flavour. Or later for aroma. Or dry hop. Whatever you want. The only cautionary note is that, unless you've harvested literally tons, there's no point sending off for an Alpha Acid evaluation. Just assume the acids are at the lower end of the range typical of the hop style. For exmpale, my Nugget has a typical range of 10 - 14% Alpha Acids. It's been a lousy summer, so I'll assume they're a mere 10%.

Wet Hopping.

A wet-hopped ale (or Harvest Ale) is something a little special. You only really get the chance to brew wet-hopped ale one or two weeks a year as you are basically picking the hops and adding them to your beer in the same day. It means a lot more organisation with your brewing day, and ordering in malts ready for the first or second Sunday in September (probably, if you’ve got a job).

The beauty of a wet-hopped ale is the seasonality, the treat you’ll wait for once a year, like a brewer’s Christmas. Also, you don’t have half the faff associated with drying bags of hops, but that’s not to say that wet hopping beer is without risk. Leave the wet hops too long (literally more than a couple of hours) and they start to decompose. If you refrigerate them they may keep a little longer, but if you freeze wet hops I'm led to believe they end up as a green, smelly mush. Best plan your weekend in advance.

If Harvest Ale is for you, then first, you’ll need to think about your recipe. Take, for example, Pale Ale Recipe #1445 from the Recipes page. It's replicated (pretty much) below, for different final volumes, based on your wet-hop harvest. If you've picked 5 ounces of fresh hops, then use the 2gal quantities, for example. If in doubt, go for a smaller batch size with more wet hops, rather than larger batch with fewer hops. Some American homebrewers use up to 1 ½ pounds of wet hops for a 5 gallon batch of Harvest Ale, so the table below is quite conservative.

Malts
1 gal
2 gal
3 gal
4 gal
5 gal
Pale Malt
1lb 6oz
2lb 12oz
4lb 2oz
5lb 8oz
6lb 14oz
Crystal Malt
2 oz
4 oz
6 oz
8 oz
10oz
Wheat Malt
1 oz
2 oz
3 oz
4 oz
5 oz






Copper Hops





Goldings (5%aa)
1/3oz
2/3oz
1oz
1 & 1/3oz
1 & 2/3oz
or
10g
20g
30g
40g
50g





Wet Hops Total
2-4oz
4-6oz
6-8oz
8-10oz
10+oz

"Some stupid catchphrase" - Jamie Oliver
The hops are harvested in the manner described above, but you’re not drying them. Instead you add them at the tail end of the boil to add an unusual flavour and aroma to your beer, in the way you would with dry hops. However, as the wet hops contain more moisture than dry hops, you would need 4 or five times more wet hops than dry. For example, if your pale ale recipe calls for ½ oz dry bobek hops at 15 mins, you would add 2 – 2 ½ ounces of fresh wet hops.

To wet hop your beer you will produce a beer that will showcase your hops, for example a golden/pale ale, or a traditional English bitter. You should probably stay away from stouts and other malt-heavy styles.

You want your hops to be green, springy when squeezed, and have full lupulin glands when opened up. The hops will start to turn a light brown at the tips when they are ready for picking. Now’s your chance.

Move fast. Get the Hot Liquor Tank on, mash in some grains, and spend the next hour thinking about how you’re going to get the hop bine cut down from 18ft up.

Next, head back inside, sparge, and run the wort into the copper. Get her fired up and add in your copper (60 minute/bittering) hops. Once the wort starts to boil, you’ve got 45 minutes to pick your hops off the bine and add them in.

T-Hopping your beer:

This is another crazy American thing, and one you wouldn't find a traditional British brewer doing. Basically, you take your taste and aroma hops, bung them in an oven at around 150oc/300of until they turn a light brown colour. These you add in the same manner as your taste/aroma additions.

The science behind it is that the Alpha Acids are neutralised or removed, thereby stabilising the lightstruck element, and it also helps isomerize the acids quicker. However, experiment here will have to be the real science. If you try it, let me know how it goes.


Other, more boring, uses for hops:

Hop pillows: dry your hops in the conventional manner, and add to them other sleep-inducing herbs, such as lavender etc. Stitch into a linen pocket and place in your pillow. Insomnia, goodnight!

If you're literally coming down with spare hops, then why not leave some of them on the bine and make a wreath out of them? They coil up fairly nice, and smell amazing. Your own 'Red Lion' feel inside your home. All you need is some horse brasses.

Your early hop shoots, the ones you dont want, can be cut and cooked in a manner similar to asparagus.