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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
  Hop processing ... ("steve.alexander")
  Aeration Methods Podcast and Revised Paper (Fred L Johnson)


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Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:42:33 -0400
From: "steve.alexander" <-s at roadrunner.com>
Subject: Hop processing ...

atomdebris writes about "curing" hops,

> Once cured, the hops will contain very little water, and freezing should be
> no problem, since it is ice crystals that burst the cell walls and cause
> your hops to turn to goo in the freezer.
While properly dried hops should not  "turn to goo" they do contain 
enough moisture to rupture cells and promote rapid staling.    The 
brewer at "Hopping Frog" suggested a technique I've adopted.  Put the 
hops (bagged as needed) into a corny keg and charge with CO2 and 
"fridge" them.

> Cut your mature hops plant down at the base.  Trim the leaves away until you
> are left with nothing but stalk, branches, and flowers.
Yes - that's a great technique IF you can afford to spend a week 
stripping leaves off one
plant.

> don't let the circulating air blow directly on the flowers as this
> will cause them to dry unevenly and may promote mold as well.
>   
No. Air flow discourages fungal growth but ...

> Put the flowers in the mason jar and fill it up without packing the flowers
> down...

WTH ?!!?  Without pulling out a record book - you should get ~1+ gallon 
of loose packed cones per plant and a 1qt container only holds a few 
ounces of dried hops  - so piddling about with mason jars is the wrong 
scale.   No you don't need to condense the water out - just air-dry 
thoroughly.

> Once again, I haven't tried this, but it should work great with hops.

Yeah it should work great if you want to spend 40 hours processing a few 
ounces of dried hops.  There are several points at which this academic 
exercise departs from reality.  The scale is way off IMO.   It takes no 
account of the amount of time necessary.  Comments about cutting away 
all leaves is laughable - it would take many many hours to process one 
plant and  many hop varieties have small leaves embedded in clusters of 
cones.  Common "fish-line" won't support a normal set of 2-3 bines.  
These things are heavy.   Several years ago one HBD poster suggested 
that I could make hop support from electrical conduit (the soft steel 1" 
diameter stuff).  That was great until the plants began to mature and 
then the frame twisted under the weigh and eventually in a modest wind 
the conduit ended bent-up like pretzels.

==

I only grow a couple varieties of hops.   I cut the plants at their base 
and tie up to 6 of the (same variety) plants together into a bundle at 
their base with sisal twine.   I  hoist the tied ends up high in my 
garage (~12ft ceiling) and if  necessary  I tie-up again to keep the 
tips off the floor.   In Fall the garage temps vary from perhaps 60F-80F 
but it's dry enough do a nice job of drying the plants.

I've found through long experience that picking of the fresh cones is 
difficult.  The stem is resilient and you can damage cones pulling them 
off.  If you wait long enough for the leaves to get "crispy" then the 
cones come off nicely, but you need to avoid collecting the crispy 
leaves (not too bad, but takes time).  The ideal is to pick the cones 
after around 3-5 days - when they are half-dried, but the leaves don't 
yet crumble.  It's much faster to grow more plants than you need and 
just pick the easy-to-reach cones.  You can spend half your time getting 
the last 15% of cones. This depends on variety - some produce big 
clusters of cones with several tiny "vestigal" leaves, others have 
little stems w/ only 3-5 cones all over.  I start by collecting the 
outer cones while the plants are hanging and then I'll cut out one plant 
(or half) at a time and pick these fairly clean.   When I collect a 5gal 
bucket of compressed (place another 5gal bucket on top and apply your 
body mass ~200lb/sf) cones I'm done.   These cones are only half-dried 
so they need to spend another week on a screen (1/4" galvanized 
"hardware cloth"  works well).

I've tried  to stem dry, then strip all the stems (leaves and cones) 
from the bines onto a tarp ((start at the top and run a leather gloved 
hand down the bines to strip.   Then you can select out cones and 
loose-crush the leaves till you collect all the cones.  My feeling is 
that this is not time-effective.

It takes me a week of evening sessions to process hops and 90% of the 
time is picking cones.  It really is time consuming so I'd be anxious to 
hear of any practical improvements (not pipe-dreams)  about processing hops.

 -S





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Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2008 07:24:12 -0400
From: Fred L Johnson <FLJohnson52 at nc.rr.com>
Subject: Aeration Methods Podcast and Revised Paper

FYI.

James Spencer interviewed me regarding the aeration method  
experiments reported on earlier. He has published it as part of his  
August 7, 20008 podcast on basicbrewingradio.com. You can get it as  
an iTunes podcast.

The revised manuscript (in which I corrected typos, word omissions,  
and other grammer screw ups) will also download with the podcast from  
iTunes, or you can download the manuscript manually at:

http://www.driveway.com/c9v2b5o6t9

Fred L Johnson
Apex, North Carolina, USA



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