Reusing Whirlpool Hops

[Dr Chris Hop]

I had a very busy brew day today. As well as doing a full grain brew I had to move the previous batch out of the fermenter to a keg and then add keg hops to a 3rd batch that’d been cold conditioning for a while. So as I was timing the whirlpool hops (50g of whole citra in 21 litres at 78oC for 30 mins) I had an idea, re-use these whirlpool hops as keg hops!!!

Whilst it may sound like anathema, we’ve all thrown spent hops into the compost and thought ‘There’s still loads of aroma in these’ haven’t we? So hopefully I’ve saved myself £3ish and not ruined a perfectly good keg. I used a sanitised slotted spoon to recover around half of the citra cones (probably got a few of the first wort Magnum too!) and put them into a sanitised keg hop / spider.

Has anyone else done this or similar before?

 

[foxy]

I had a very busy brew day today. As well as doing a full grain brew I had to move the previous batch out of the fermenter to a keg and then add keg hops to a 3rd batch that’d been cold conditioning for a while. So as I was timing the whirlpool hops (50g of whole citra in 21 litres at 78oC for 30 mins) I had an idea, re-use these whirlpool hops as keg hops!!!

Whilst it may sound like anathema, we’ve all thrown spent hops into the compost and thought ‘There’s still loads of aroma in these’ haven’t we? So hopefully I’ve saved myself £3ish and not ruined a perfectly good keg. I used a sanitised slotted spoon to recover around half of the citra cones (probably got a few of the first wort Magnum too!) and put them into a sanitised keg hop / spider.

Has anyone else done this or similar before?

It is done the other way around the dry hops into the boil of another brew, see how it turns out.

 

[Dr Chris Hop]

It seemed to work pretty well and certainly hasn’t spoiled anything. I wouldn’t go out of my way to do it again but if the timings coincided again I’d happily repeat it.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

The point is that dry hopping is primarily about extracting the most delicate and volatile aroma compounds, which are either lost or extracted more readily at higher temperatures. So if you dry hop first, you only extract the volatile compounds, then if you reuse in the boil you're extracting all the less volatile compounds that were not touched at dry hop temperatures. If you use them hot to start with, you lose a lot of those volatiles within minutes.