I need to know, it there a way to test the AA of hops? Or to determine the type of the hops?

I have a guy who has had my home brew that found a whole gaggle of wild hops on his place and wants a pale ale with "his" hops. any of you growers have a suggestion of WTF to do?

Wild hops? thats cool.

Nothing else to add but I will be watching.

just do a hop bursted Pale ale...then the AA's wont matter much...just get 10 IBU's from a hop you know the AA's and add "his" hops in the last 10 mins...that is what I would do..

Good idea Fist

There's a good chance real wild hops are Cluster.

That really suggests either a Cream Ale or Classic American Pilsner.

Sorry I don't have a link but I have seen a discussion that suggests it is probably too expensive to test AA for a small harvest and too complicated to do yourself. I think about the best you're gonna do is make a one gallon test batch with maybe a quarter or half oz at 60min and decide to scale up or down on a larger batch. When they are picked and how well they are dried plays into the equation.

Are they really wild hops, or are they hops that were planned, then neglected?

I guess it doesn't make a lot of difference. The end result is the same. You could do one with the wild hops as the aroma hops and do a small batch where you guess at the aa% and see how it turns out. If he has a lot of the hops, you might be able to quit buying hops. If they're good, get some rhizomes from him.

If so only God knows when they were planted, the place where they are is an abandoned gravel pit my dad worked at in the early 70s. I showed him a pic of a hop bine and he says "oh them things, I can tell you exactly where that sh1t is"



With the way my wife is, and as close as this is to my place, I may just have to have a "remote" growing location

yup... use a known AA% hop for the bittering addition, then use the wild hops for the aroma and flavor... even dry hop with them, too.

oh, and to test the AA% of homegrown hops, you have to send them off to a lab... they were talking about it on the BN.

Hop Union does AA testing... $35/test
http://www.hopunion.com/27_HopTesting.cfm?p5=open

this place does, too... $24/test.
http://www.brewlaboratory.com/

I think hops like most plants are highly varied. Grapes grown in one soil with one climate will be quite different than those gown elsewhere, even if they are the same variety. That said it will be hard to know what you've got until you brew with it and taste the results.

Making tea can be one way to get a glimpse of what you've got. It worked in my garden where I could make teas using fresh hops from plant A and B. I'm not sure how you could translate it to something known and store bought. You could get a good idea of the flavor but bitterness is much tougher.

The unique thing with hops is there are many varieties and they all have different traits/flavors to them. Some with give of a citrus flavor,some piney,some herbal,etc...so making a hop tea doesn't sound like a bad idea so you could compare it to a known hop. I would try to find out for sure what you're working with though,especially if you plan on making your own little hop garden with these "wild" hops.

You can estimate bitterness by comparing it to a known hop by making a hop tea with the same amount of each hop, and then adding a measured amount of sugar to each tea, tasting and repeating until the sweetness is in balance with the bitterness.

The unknown hop will have an approximate AA% related to how much more or less sugar it took to counteract the bitterness vs the known hop. So say your known hop is 5% AA, and the unknown takes 50% more sugar to counteract the bitterness. It would be approximately 7.5% AA. If it took 80% as much sugar, it'd be approximately 4% AA.

These are very rough approximations, but close enough to get you in the ballpark for brewing.

Edit: Found a link to an article that explains the process better. It's towards the bottom of the page.