Monday, January 08, 2007

Brewing Beer: How do you separate the hop cones from the beer?

When dry hopping or fresh hopping how do you get all the hops out of the carboy? I really want to bottle or keg this fresh hopped ipa but I'm stuck. Here are my goals. ~ extract all the hop oils I can from the hop cones ~ minimize the leaves floating around in the final beer ~ minimize the oxygen exposure I guess I could just siphon it into the keg and be done with it, but, would I be getting the most hop oils from the cones? Maybe the oil has been dissolved by the alcohol in the beer and I have nothing to worry about. I don't know. Any suggestions? Can anybody share their experiences/thoughts/ideas? What would you do? (The picture above was taken right after I added the hops. Now the hop cones look all brown and bloated with beer. Kinda cool. I'll post a picture.)

6 comments:

grove said...

Getting the beer out of there is a lot easier than getting the hop cones out, so siphoning into the keg is the way to go IMO.

How long have the fresh hops been in the fermenter?

Adam said...

Thanks grove. I was afraid of that.

Have you dry hopped before? I noticed you have a pretty well written beer log (b + log :-).

Regarding the hops. Its been in there About 7 weeks. Not sure if that's too long. Some have reported a grassy taste when leaving the cones in for extended periods of time.

Eli said...

I'd say the best thing to do would be to send me a bottle or two once its done.

That sort of karmic beerination will practically guarantee it works out for the best.

Adam said...

You never know!

Where are you located? Send us an email at...

beerguys@brewlounge.com

grove said...

I've dry hopped a pale ale and an india pale ale with 1 ounce of cascade hops for about two weeks. I found the result a bit too vegetal for my taste. Next time I'll try two ounces for 5 days.

Seven weeks sounds like a long time to dry hop, but nothing must go untried, right? From what you wrote this seems to be fresh hops and not dried hops, so *wet hopping* will probably give the beer different kinds of flavours. It'll be interesting to see what you think about it. :)

Adam said...

Grove,

Thanks for sharing that. Sheesh...I better get on the stick here. I did taste it a few weeks back and it tasted great.

"nothing must go untried" :-)

I will definately let you know how it goes.