Fresh Hop Brewing

Ska Brewing - (Durango, Colorado)

We brewed 30 barrels of the Hoperation Ivy #11. That's 930 gallons.

We tried to hop pretty continuously throughout the process. The first photo is of me adding fresh hops even to the Sparge (where we trickle water through the mash bed of malted barley on its way to the kettle). The theory here is that while we are not picking up any alpha acids from the hops, bitterness (you have to boil to get that) we are making all of the "beer" (it's really sweet wort at this point) with the fresh hops and hopefully picking up the flavors of the hops into the kettle along with our sweet liquid...wort.

Then throughout the boil we added fresh hops and because we didn't have enough fresh hops for the whole brew we also added pelletized hops for the bittering additions. We used the fresh hops at the end of the boil (the flavoring hops) and into our whirlpool tank. In the last photo is Chase adding the fresh hops to our hop socks where all of the now boiled 'beer' (wort) makes its way to the heat exchanger to be cooled on the way to the fermenter. This is known as using a 'hop back'.

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