Hops experiment

[DBOYDR]

Does anyone know why you couldn't take a large bag (say 8-16 oz) of hops, boil it in water (or a super simple wort) for 1 hour, strain and freeze it, then use it as your hop addition? So you could basically just make your wort, boil for 10 minutes to sanitize it throw in the pre-prepared bittering hops and then chill?

Could knock an hour off the brew day I figure. Plus would make it more consistent.

 

[GFHomebrew]

Sounds interesting I've not tried this and can't see why not just boiling wort is good for more than hop utilisation it also drives off DMS in the wort and other unwanted nasties. Interesting idea none the less look forward to the results findings.

 

[Hogarthe]

I guess that would be like making your own home made hop extract. Not sure how well it would work out but you could try.

 

[Mark Farrall]

If you're good at picking up DMS (I'm awful, so it wouldn't worry me) you'll need the boil time to work on reducing that in the finished beer. If you're using pale malt. If the maltster hasn't driven off a lot of the precursors in their malting process.

I've also heard this done in discussions about historical brewing methods. No idea why it has gone in and out of fashion. Probably the difficulty in stopping the various microbes taking over (prior to refrigeration).

 

[Drewfus1]

From what I understand, the theoretical saturation point of iso-alpha acids in beer is approximately 110 IBUs. Past that point you're just wasting hops because the acids won't dissolve into solution. Of course, in practice, the number you'll be able to achieve will likely be much lower. As a result, you might need to ad a lot of frozen bitter wort to hit your bitterness target. Speaking of which, you'll probably have a hell of a time hitting your desired bitterness with this method unless you go through extensive experimentation. Since you'd need to add a fair amount of frozen wort, you'd need to freeze large amounts, which (depending on your freezer) could take a long time. I'd recommend boiling your frozen wort for 10 minutes before adding it to make sure you avoid contamination.

All in all, its probably simpler to just boil the wort for the normal amount of time and avoid all these extra steps. It appears that it might save time, but in the end, may take longer and cause a string of other problems you normally wouldn't have to deal with. But thats just my thought on the concept. There are others here with far more knowledge of all things beer.

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

making a hop tea for flavor it's common, as far as bittering hops you have to boil it but hops mildew very fast I'm not sure about freezing and thawing, I would only use it fresh

 

[J A]

The boiling, as noted, isn't just for sterilization of the wort. Even if, as some argue, DMS is all but mytical, a substantial boil time is useful for coagulating proteins and, of course, concentrating your sugars. Efficiency would plummet if you didn't sparge in some way to extract all the sugars possible and then boil off a substantial amount of the water you used to do so. First runnings would be quite nice for a reasonable OG, but the volume would be very low so your efficiency would suck.
All that being said, you could definitely do what you're suggesting with extract brewing and probably make better use (at least in terms of bittering) of a smaller amount of hops than you'd normally use for a short-boil extract batch.

 

[Nosybear]

Does anyone know why you couldn't take a large bag (say 8-16 oz) of hops, boil it in water (or a super simple wort) for 1 hour, strain and freeze it, then use it as your hop addition? So you could basically just make your wort, boil for 10 minutes to sanitize it throw in the pre-prepared bittering hops and then chill?

Could knock an hour off the brew day I figure. Plus would make it more consistent.

You boil wort for a few more reasons than just hop utilization. You drive off DMS, you precipitate proteins. You drive off oxygen. You concentrate the wort. You develop flavor and color compounds. You effectively sterilize it. You lower the pH. But if I could offer a suggestion that will get you what you want, start using DME instead of mashing. It's been boiled so all the goodness a boil brings has been done, you save the time and you're using a high-quality, consistent product. I've won competitions with extract brews and have a recipe for a 15-minute beer that does almost exactly what you suggest (I do boil hops for the full 15 minutes). Makes good beer, too!