Hop Bursting with Leaf Hops or Wet Hops? Use a Hop Back!

Hop bursting, the act of bittering a beer with first wort and adding flavor and aroma additions after flameout is an excellent technique to significantly enhance the hop presence in your beers, but for home brewers it can be difficult to do with whole leaf or wet hops. During extraction of our luscious hot wort from the kettle, we run the chance of clogging our valve with leaf hop matter, making for a sticky end and aggravating end to our brew day. So what other option do we have? A Hop Back!

In "olden days," the English used Hop Backs to run hot wort through leaf hops to filter trub from the beer, while still increasing the flavor and aroma of the finished product by extracting essential hop oils. Today, many modern breweries use Hop Backs, but in a different form...to optimize hop flavor by running wort or beer through an air tight container to infuse the wort/beer with hop oils.

As all-grain home brewers, we have the ability to use a Hop Back as well, by using our mash tun. Most mast tuns have either a finely slotted steel or plastic manifold at the bottom of the container, or a slotted false bottom. By adding leaf hops (instead of malted barley), and running wort into the container, we can obtain the hop oils in a manner that will not boil off the essential oils (such as the boil). I will suggest the container be covered as the wort will still be near boiling (below) and some oils will evaporate and try to leave the container...smelling awesome but not really helping the final flavor/aroma of the beer. Finally, using the manifold or false bottom and a valve, we will remove the newly oiled wort from the hops, chill through a counter-flow chiller, and place into the fermenter. My guess is that I will find significantly less trub than a typical batch due to the filtering of the wet hop cones.