Looking for ways to reduce your hop inventory, reduce ingredient cost, and increase brewhouse yields?
Whether you are brewing moderate to very heavily hopped beers, the use of CO2 Hop extract and CryoHops® can fulfill all these requirements.
CO2 Hop Extract
CO2 Hop Extract is by far one of the most shelf stable hop products around. Yakima Chief Hops CO2 Hop Extract is produced using a supercritical CO2 process which extracts the soft resins and essential oils contained in hops. The extraction process filters out solid particles while the CO2 is recovered and reused. The resulting pure resin extract is analyzed in the lab and packaged into food-grade tins for use in brewing.
Brewers get the benefit of variety specific hop extract without adding solids that soak up valuable brew when removed from the wort stream. This creates efficiency in the brewing process and in turn, additional revenue as more beer is produced per batch. In addition, hop extract is highly concentrated, so it comes with lower shipping costs and requiring less storage space.
The tins are generally packaged based on grams of alpha acid (GMA) and are labeled on the bottom with 16-9000 food grade ink for easy product identification. There are many methods to dosing CO2 hop extract successfully.
Two common methods include:
- Adding an open or perforated tin to a grant during runoff, or
- Mixing it with hot water/wort in a secondary vessel and pouring the resulting mixture into the kettle boil. CO2 hop extract is not isomerized until it is boiled during the brewing process.
Yakima Chief Hops provides digital extract calculators on their website HERE. For guidance on creating a new CO2 hop extract recipe, consult the Dosage Calculator. To convert a traditional recipe into CO2 hop extract for the bittering addition, utilize the Conversion Calculator. The following calculation can be utilized to convert pounds of hop pellets to GMA: (pounds of hop pellets) X 454g X (% alpha acid) = GMA
In Summary, CO2 Hop Extract offers many brewhouse benefits. It provides increased brewhouse yield through reduced kettle trub and wort losses. Compared to traditional forms of hop products, extract offers increased alpha utilization, and it is extremely shelf stable, with storage requirements that are drastically reduced compared to traditional hop products.
CryoHops®
CryoHops® offers brewers approximately twice the concentration of resin content of traditional T90 hop pellets, and as such, they should be dosed at approximately half the amount by weight. Brewers should note that CryoHops® will create intense hop flavor and aroma, with reduced vegetal and polyphenol flavor contribution because the leafy, plant material has been removed. The flavor profile is variety specific, but more pronounced due to the concentration. It can be applied anytime during the brew, but early kettle recommendations are not recommended for risk of boiling out the intense aroma.
CryoHops® offers similar benefits of Resinate®; a greater brewhouse yield is achieved through reduced trub and wort losses. By needing to utilize approximately half the amount of traditional T 90 pellets, required inventory space is reduced as well.
Used in conjunction with each other, these hop products from YCH can help dramatically reduce hop inventory, costs, wort/beer loses, all the while allowing you to reclaim valuable cooler space.
