Drying my home grown hops

Picking a few kilos of hops is awesome but it does mean that there's a bit of work to be done in a short time. Hops either need to be used very soon after picking or dried out for use at a later time. Short of having an oast or a makeshift fan and fly screen contraption, a food dehydrator set to low temperature is a good way to dry the crop. The only real drawback I found was that it doesn't have a large capacity so it took me 6 batches to get through the full harvest.

Loading up the dehydrator. It's probably a
bit overfull. 

I loaded up the dehydrator and set it to 35C and it took 6.5 hours to dry the first batch. The trays needed to be swapped after a few hours as the bottom layer dried quicker than the top. For later batches I turned the temperature up to 41C, filled the trays a little less and managed to get the time down to about 4 hours. I'd have preferred to keep it at 35C but I've read that commercial hop drying is carried out warmer than that and I had to return the dehydrator.

Weighing out the dried hops for bagging

As they dried the room was filled with the aroma of sweet perfume, pine and grass. It was incredible. My wife said the smell brought back childhood memories of Christmas with real pine trees.

It felt like I was bagging drugs

Light, heat and oxygen are the enemies of hops. So after drying I weighed them out into 60g lots and put them in vacuum sealed bags and then into the freezer. In theory I'll be able to use them months and months down the track and they'll be close to as good as they are today.

Ready for the freezer

All up I finished up with 640g of dried hops from 2.736kg of wet hops - way more than I'll be able to use this year given my plans.

Sticky lupulin goodness! It smells just
like the hops on the vine.

I'm thinking of doing a small boil and ferment in an erlenmeyer flask to get an idea of the level of bitterness they'll contribute. I can't measure the bitterness in a scientific way but even a taste should give me enough of an idea to plan future brews with it.

2014 Hop Harvest

I planted my Hallertau and Saaz rhizomes 2 1/2 years ago and since then they've been pretty well neglected. They're growing in my mate Jason's backyard, running along a reinforcing steel tunnel that used to be a hothouse frame. And even though I've neglected them, they've treated me very well. In their first year they didn't do much, last year we were pleasantly surprised to get 440g wet hops from them and today we harvested 2.98kg of wet hops from the Hallertau vine.

The Saaz has always lagged behind the Hallertau and its much smaller crop looks like it needs at least another month to mature.

The Hallertau flowers smell beautifully floral, perfume-like really. The plan is to use some wet hops in a Saison I've got planned for Saturday. The rest are being dried in a dehydrator and I'll vacuum seal them and keep them in the freezer until I'm ready to use them. I'm expecting to have 500-600g of dried hops.

Plump hop flowers ready for the picking!

Some of the flowers were pretty huge!

Jason getting a good whiff

Hopppsssssssssssss

Brewday: Hefeweizen

It happened like this: I had a packet of the WY3068 Weihenstephaner yeast that was pushing its use-by date and I just received my order from a bulk buy organised through the Aussie Home Brew forum. I had to brew and it had to be a hefeweizen. It was out of my hands.

My old German teacher would not approve, he's not a fan of Bavarians

Weihenstephaner's Hefeweizen was an early part of my craft beer education. In a beer scene that can get pretty silly with stuff like 'I bet I can melt your face with my IBUs' (which I love by the way), these beers just quietly do their thing and do it so well that they're still favourites of mine years later.

I now have ALL the grain

Getting a grain mill changed my life for the better

It's a really simple recipe, the magic comes from the yeast and the job of the brewer is to treat it right and get out of the way. It's 50/50 wheat and pils malt. Thanks to the bulk buy I now have some good German pilsner malt which should help. I used 8g of Tasmanian Hallertau, not very authentic but since it's gone in at 60 minutes and is only contributing 13-14 IBUs I don't think it'll be too much of a problem.

Water nearly ready, just put the bag in place

This was my first attempt at a stepped mash. The idea of a stepped mash is to allow the enzymes active at different temperatures to contribute their thing to the mash process. I'm hoping that it will provide better mouthfeel, a good head, good attenuation and maybe even better efficiency. And everything. Make my beer amazing, please, stepped mash.

First step

The plan was for rests at 55/67/72/78'C and it went ok but my first rest was a bit high and the second (the main rest) lost lots more heat over the hour than normal. It's a pretty cold day in Hobart though so I guess I'm just going to have to factor that in during winter. The other two were spot on. It took quite a bit longer than my normal mashes but I had back to back NBA games to watch so that wasn't a problem. Next time I'll be better prepared and I think it'll go really smoothly.

90 minute boil, hops in with 60 minutes remaining.

Mug-o-hops

At the back, living with the Stout and Brown Ale

Nice and easy. I'm planning on using some of the yeast slurry from this batch for a Dunkelweizen next week. Might as well make the most of it.