Today, we are brewing a super exciting new beer... To celebrate our 5th Anniversary of operations, we are brewing a Triple IPA with wet hops. This is the first time we have brewed a wet hop beer and I'm pumped up about these hops. They were picked in the middle of the night in Michigan, immediately placed on a refrigerated truck, and driven directly to the brewery, arriving about 13 hours after being harvested. We had delayed mashing in our first batch by a few hours so that the hops would be able to go immediately into our wort, straight off the truck.
Unfortunately, brewing with wet hops has provided several problems. The first was obviously the logistics of scheduling a hop delivery for a brewday, knowing that we wanted to brew with the hops upon arrival. But the less obvious problem came from brewing techniques... At what point did we want to add the fresh hops? In the past, we have only used dried, pelletized hops as that is what our system was built to handle. Even just using whole hops would have provided a problem, but we decided to use whole wet hops for this beer. If we were to add them to our kettle, we would not have been able to get much of the wort to transfer through the heat exchanger since the flowers would have clogged our plumbing.
To overcome this problem, we decided that we would brew a batch as normal, but after boiling he wort, we pumped all the liquid back into our mash tun, which we filled with 120 lbs of wet hops and allowed the hops to steep in the hot wort. After 5 minutes of sitting on the hops, we used our mash tun false bottom to filter the hops out as the wort was pumped through the heat exchanger. Having never brewed this way before, I was horrified at the prospect of the false bottom clogging and not allowing any wort through, which would have resulted in the loss of nearly $6,000 of raw materials. Luckily, our makeshift "Hopback" method worked well and we were able to have a normal yield on our first batch of the day.
However, the next problem arose from having to use the mash tun for a hop addition... We were then unable to mash the second batch of the day until after the time that we were finished brewing the first batch completely. Normally, we would have two batches going at once, but in this case we couldn't have the overlap. That, combined with a delayed start, has resulted in what will likely be a nearly 20 hour day. Even with the annoyance of the prospect of being here late into the middle of the night, I still can't wait for this beer.
In addition to the Chinook wet hops, we used Mandarina Bavaria hops (discussed in my previous blog post about Hoptoberfest) and Cascade hops. The beer will be around 11% ABV, and as all of my hoppy beers are brewed, there is no bittering addition of hops, but rather, gratuitous amounts of late hop additions and dry hops. Look for the beer to hit the shelves in early October and DO NOT AGE this beer. Buy fresh, and drink fresh for maximum lupulin enjoyment!
