Wet hop recipe help?

[northern brewer]

Well, its about hop harvest time in the upper peninsula and I will be making a wet hop beer either this weekend or next from my cascade hop bines. (Santium and Northern Brewer are not quite ready to harvest yet.)

So far I am thinking about using my house standard APA recipe and simply hopping it with all wet hops using 6 times the amount by weight.
Here it goes so far,

92% American 2-row
4% Crystal 40
4% Crystal 60

6 oz Cascade wet hops - 60 min
3 oz Cascade wet hops - 5 min
3 oz Cascade wet hops - Flameout

Fermentis US-05 dry yeast

Any suggestions / warnings / alterations that I should consider?

Thanks for the help

[Cuda]

Any suggestions / warnings / alterations that I should consider?

Thanks for the help

I posted the same question over at the morebeer forums.

http://www.sonomabeerocrats.org/art/hoptime.pdf

Here is the recipe for Russianriver's wet hop beer.

I also e-mail Vinnie with a few questions about wet hopped beer here is the e-mail...
Vinnie,

I have a question about dry hopping my wet hopped beer that I'm getting ready to make. I found your Hoptime Harvest ale recipe, and I have a good amout of cascade and Chinook this year.(enough for 5gals) So i'm going to give your recipe a try. My question is about dry hopping with wet hops and getting some wild yeast in the beer from the hops? Should I worry about it?

Mike,

I wouldn’t worry about wild yeast or anything, this type of beer is meant to be consumed fresh and quickly, so, I can’t see anything happening. Even if a little wild yeast got into the brew, it would probably be such a small amount that over time could grow to something that you should be concerned with, but, in a short period, you should (I hope) have consumed all of the brew.

When we dry hop with the wet hops (that doesn’t make sense…) we have these things laying on the ground while we pluck the hops and than we put them in a hop bag with some weights and go for it. I’ve been making wet hop beers since 1999 and I have never had an issue.

Good luck,
Vinnie


Vinnie Cilurzo
Brewer / Owner
Russian River Brewing Company


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[northern brewer]

Thanks a bunch for the help cuda. This one will be going into the fermenter this friday.

[Cuda]

Thanks a bunch for the help cuda. This one will be going into the fermenter this friday.

Keep us up to date on yours and I will do the same. I will be dry hopping mine at the end of the week.

[northern brewer]

This beer turned out f'ing awesome. The fresh hop taste is incredible. I just finished off the keg and plan on trying to up this to at least two batches next year if I can get enough production from my bines. The final recipe turned out like this

12lb 2-row pale
6 oz crystal 40
6 oz crystal 60
1 lb carapils

8 oz Cascade wet hops for 90 min
5 oz Cascade wet hops for 30 min
8 oz Cascade wet hops at flameout
2 oz Cascade wet hops at dry hop after 1 week

Fermentis US-05 ale yeast

If there is anything that I would change, especially after listening to the wet hop sunday show, I think that I will add some munich or vienna into the mix next year to add some more malt complexity. Other than that this was a great expiriment and will become an early fall annual beer for sure.

[nahthan]

Wet hop ales are awesome.. Here's what I used for the malt bill this year:

Percentage
41.1% American Pale Malt(2-row)
41.1% Maris Otter Pale Malt(2-row)
5.5% Weyermann Vienna
5.5% Turbinado Sugar
2.7% American Crystal 15L
2.7% Cara-Pils Dextrine Malt
1.4% American Wheat Malt

The Maris Otter and Vienna for a little malt richness.. bready, biscuity,
but not as heavy and dark in color as Munich.
Turbinado sugar to dry it out a touch..
Crystal 15 and carapils or a little caramel flavor, but not too much..
the splash of wheat for head retention.

1.060 OG, 1.012 FG

I did use 35IBU of Horizon pellets for bittering.. As Brian Hunt said, these things take so much work to grow, why waste all of those aromatics? Otherwise, it was 4.5LB of wet hops freshly picked all added over the last 15 minutes of the boil.. The results were awesome.

Hop porn of the vines nearing completion:
http://destroy.net/photos/hops-2007/

Cheers! Kippis! Skål! Prost!

-Nathan