Once your hops are dehydrated, you want to make sure that you store them properly. If you have a food sealer where you can vacuum out the air and make the packaging airtight, you are in good shape. For those without a food sealer, a simple zip lock bag will work well.
There is a new trend to use hops that are fresh off the vine. You don't get anything fresher than that! Make sure you use a recipe designed around using "wet hops" because there is a flavor difference. Try an internet search to find recipes that call for hops that are not dehydrated. Place your hops in the bag, get as much air out as possible, and seal. Place the bag in the freezer if you do not plan on using for awhile.
I have to transfer the hop cones to some dehydrator trays to finish drying them down. Commercial hop dryers may go up to degrees Fahrenheit, but I keep my dehydrators set to about degrees Fahrenheit and let them go for a day or two.
My goal is to dry them without heating the oils and resins. I check my hop cones after at least 24 hours. The center stem of the hop cone should be brittle and break apart when it's bent. The entire hop cone should be crispy. An artsy view of the hop resin on a drying tray. It's the hop universe, expanding! Once my hops are dried, I have to do something to keep the oils and resins from oxidizing.
The long-term enemies are heat, oxygen, and light. If I just put them loosely in a jar on my kitchen counter, they will lose a lot of their great smell within even a month. They can even go rancid. And nobody wants rancid hops! I have to keep hopping and get them in long-term storage.
These little hops cones haven't been dried yet. They smell so wonderful! I keep my hops the freezer. That's right, the freezer! The freezer is great for keeping the hop oils and resins cold and in the dark. But I have to work to keep their oxygen exposure low. If I vacuum packed my hops and put them in the freezer, they keep great for at least 18 months.
I store my hops in canning jars and put the jars in the freezer. I do keep some jars of my hops in my old, double-walled pumphouse that covers my irrigation well and, like a root cellar, holds all my jars of homegrown and foraged produce that I preserve.
But I use those hops pretty quickly, during the winter and certainly by the next year. Taking my hop stash to storage. So I need to get as much air as I can out of the jars. I don't want to vacuum pack the hops with the heat of a canner. Commercial hop operations compress their dried hops into big bales. I just compress my hops directly into the jar. The more hops I get in the jar, the less air can be in there.
I use a cutout circle from a yogurt or cottage cheese lid to compress my hops down into the jar. I pack those dried hops in the jars really tightly. I use the plastic circle as a press. It works pretty well. That all important hop resin is super sticky! So everything it touches — the dehydrator tray, other tools, and my hands — have to be washed well before they get used for anything else. Thankfully, the resin is easily cleaned up with hot water and soap. Hop resin is super sticky!
It gets on everything! Don't lick your fingers -- hop resin is super bitter, too! I use my hops for a bunch of different things. In brewing beer at home, a lot of people buy hop pellets and pick out specific varieties for either their aromatic qualities or their bittering qualities.
But they I use them for a lot more, too! I really like Hop Tea. And hops make even cheap hot chocolate packets into a nice Hop Chocolate with IPA-lovers will appreciate. Hop soda and hop popsicles are good.
I cook with hops, too — hop macaroni and cheese, and a little bit in with a stew or roast, and more. And a little hop sack makes for great sleeping. Yay - great hop harvest that will make me happy for a good long while!
Now I just have to clean up all that sticky hop resin - and relax with a beer! And I harvest an entirely different hop crop in the spring! Haphazard Homestead - foraging, gardening, nature, simple living close to the land.
Or check out my YouTube video on harvesting hops. Im glad I found this post, though not wuickly enough to resteem it. We have a hops bine in for its second year and were wondering how to handle the hops.
Youve given me all the info we need. That's neat that you have a hops bine! They are such monsters. They want to grow! After they are established, they will put on a lot of runners. You might be interested in eating your spring hop shoots, too.
They are really good in a lot of ways. I like hops, too, because they die back every winter. So every year starts new. Enjoy all your hops! Maybe you will make a post about them! Ill look at the post on shoots. We put put hops bine in between us and the afternoon sun as a pergola. The theiry being that we have an edible plant that will shade us in summer and die back in winter to allow the sun ro reach the house.
We griw it also for its medicinal uses. Thanks, everyone for your upvotes. What a surprise -- and I hope you all get to enjoy some hops in the near future, in one form or another! Special thanks to pfunk and justtryme90 , who both promoted this in some chat rooms.
Just takes a bit of a spark to get things going here sometimes. Great to see content like this - going to try to make some hoppy mac and cheese, but starting from a box of Annie's Mac and Cheese. Any quick advice? Boil hops in water used to cook the macaroni to extract the oils?
I am so sad this wonderful post didn't get more exposure. I have tried to put it out there a little bit for you. Thanks for your appreciation of my post and helping get the word out there. I haven't made very many posts and don't have many followers, so I don't expect much. I figure it's part of a longer process.
It's up to me to figure out how to build on all my posts elsewhere, too. I'll be writing more about hops -- there' a lot more to them than most people think. And most people don't even think about hops, haha -- I'm a deep-niche writer, I guess.
Cascade must be a really versatile variety of hops. You could also place your hops between air filters strapped to a box fan as The Mad Fermentationist outlines. The higher the heat and the longer they are exposed to heat, the more aromatics will be lost.
Thus, limiting the heat factor as much as possible is especially important for aroma varieties. Air drying really is your best option. In such a case you can use a food dehydrator or conventional oven. The dehydrator is probably a slightly better option because you have better and lower temperature control. Simply set your dehydrator between and o F and put your hops in it. The higher heat most ovens have a low setting somewhere around o F makes it easy to over dry hops, even scorch them.
If you do use an oven watch your hops like a hawk. Even removing them every few minutes to avoid any scorching can be a good idea. Expect them to be done relatively quickly. To know when your hops are at that desired 8 to 10 percent moisture we have to go back to the dry matter test we first used to test hop ripeness.
Once you have what percentage of the hop was water we can calculate what the target weight, with the desired moisture content, should be. So, say we have a test sample of around 2 ounces 57 grams. We dry it, checking the weight once-in-a-while; the weight stabilizes at 14 grams. To find out moisture content, we use this calculation:.
Hop varieties can dry out at different rates. Once you know the dry matter percentage of your sample you can calculate the target weight of any amount of hops at your target moisture. So, if we had, say, another pound grams to dry, we can use calculation taken from the University of Vermont paper referenced above:. I realize these can both be pretty subjective, but do the best you can.
Better to have slightly inferior hops you can use, than a wilted rancid unusable mess. Once the hops are dry packaging and storage are pretty straight forward. Weigh your hops out and separate them into 1-ounce piles.
Separating them into smaller packages will make it easy to defrost and use only what you need. Now put each ounce in freezer-safe Ziploc bags. If not, try to push as much air out of the bag as possible. This, of course, will mean crushing the hops, but better to have crushed hops than a bunch of oxygen breaking your hops down.
Once done mark the weight and hop variety on each bag and stick them in your freezer. What to do now? Maybe just pull one of those bags back out and brew something!
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