Hops Harvest Complete
Friday, September 21st, 2012The 2012 hops harvest is complete! Everything is packaged and dried.
The process is to first harvest the hops by hand picking. You can cut the vines down, but this year I decided to leave them up and use a small step ladder to reach the higher cones. My advice is to only harvest one variety at a time and keep track of where each variety is in the picking / drying / packing process.
Then you want to let the hops dry for about 48 hours, until they are no longer moist to the touch. I weighed a few of the samples before and after. There was about a 50% reduction in weight. This runs counter to the advice of using 4-7 times the normal amount when brewing a fresh hop beer…
The false bottom came in handy for the smaller crops:
When they are dry, weigh them out for packaging. One of my recipes calls for 2 oz of Chinook, so I weighed out that amount for that particular bag.
A vacuum sealer is a wonderful tool for this process.
I then label the bag, and put them in the freezer.
The inventory feature at the site helps me keep track of what I have. I wonder if I will ever get around to using that 2010 Willamette??
Here is the breakdown of what I got, and the order harvested in. It seems like Kent Goldings is always latest in the season to harvest.
- Chinook – 10.5 oz
- Hallertau – 10.2 oz (two vines)
- Cascade – 2.2 oz
- Zeus – 2.2 oz
- Fuggle – 2.9 oz
- Magnum – 1.6 oz
- Nugget – 7.7 oz
- Goldings – 5.25 oz
- TOTAL: 42.5 oz = 2.65 pounds, @ $2.00 per ounce retail – about $85 dollars in hops, I’ll take it! You can beat the price of $2/oz if you buy in bulk.
Post by Larry
5 Responses to “Hops Harvest Complete”
I’ve dried mine on window screens, similar to what it looks like you’ve got, with a fan underneath. I’ve found that after about 72 hours they lose 60%-75% of their water weight. So that’s closer to a 3x or 4x wet-to-dry ratio, where yours is more like 2x.
But commercial hop growers actually kiln dry them at about 120°F. I bet if we had that equipment we’d see the cones lose 80% or more of their weight, which would truly make the ratio of wet hops from our bines to the pelletized hops at the LHBS 5:1.
I guess the only way to know for sure would be to actually send a sample of your hops to a lab to test for AA% by weight.
By Matt on Sep 21, 2012
Next year I may set aside some hops and let them dry out for an extra day or two. I will keep records of the moisture loss. I agree it is possible that near 75% of the weight can be lost to drying. At the same time a 7x weight loss just seems outrageous (that is what 85%?). When I first read that stat, I laughed to myself and thought it was a justification by marketers to sell more hops. 3-4x is my guess, we’ll have to wait until next year to find out :)
This year, they were starting to feel papery, and that is when I normally package. Besides I needed to make room to continue the drying process since I had so many varieties to process!
By Larry on Sep 22, 2012
How do you know what the AA% is of hops you grow?? Is the strain pretty consistent, or is each hop season make a small change based on rainfall, temp, etc..
By Tom on Sep 22, 2012
That is part of the fun of using your own hops – you don’t know for sure. Lab testing would be required to know for sure, but not worth it at this scale. I just use the variety’s average AA.
By Larry on Sep 25, 2012
I was wondering if anyone had used a food dehydrator and what the results they got with it?
By Kythe on Jan 18, 2013