Home made hop aroma extract

http://beerandwinejournal.com/hop-aroma-extract/

Has anyone tried this? I am considering giving this a try on next IPA. I would wonder if this would take the place entirely of a standard whirlpool.

Bump.

The reason I am curious about trying this, is that I with my hoppy IPAs that derive majority of kettle hop flavor/aroma from the whirlpool, I am chasing my tail trying to get any kind of aroma that is not from the dryhop.

This method interested me, because during early stages of fermentation these beers smell absolutely divine. Makes sense that the aromas are off-gassing with the CO2.

This late addition of a small volume of “whirlpooled” wort at end of primary might allow those aromas to stick around.

I’ve tried it many times, but it’s tricky to get it right and isolate primarily the aromatic aspects of the hop (maybe that’s why the better examples of commercially available aroma extracts made in the US and Europe are very expensive), I’ve pretty much given up on trying to produce my own. I buy some perodically (when I can afford it).

As I’ve probably written here before (admittedly ad nauseum :shock: ) the Ballantine brewery in Newark NJ for decades made their own distilled hop extracts in house and used them very generously in both their XXX ale and their IPA. I’ve actually yet to taste a single commercial IPA today (from any brewery of any size) that had been able to produce an IPA that had the aroma intensity of Ballantine’s version. Most of them are also cloudy (which, no matter what anyone tells you, doesn’t have to happen at all with very highly hopped ales).

Around 35 years ago, I was told by a former Ballantine employee that he believed the brewery (which by then had been shuttered for close to a decade) had a vacuum steam distillation unit, which makes sense to me since the significantly lower temps boiling point would probably at least help to preserve more of the aromatic elements that were desired, without inflicting a lot of damage to the character.
He did say that they used primarily Bullion hops to produce the oils (and for a time, they also used Brewers Gold). I’ve used both varieties regularly and they do have a very distinctive and intense aroma quality.

Thanks for the response. However, I am thinking you were trying to somehow isolate specific aromatic compounds.

I guess the thread title, and even the title to the article I linked, do kind of imply that. But what I am after is basically a small-volume whirlpool (hopstand) added to the beer after the majority of primary fermentation has finished. So there really isn’t any isolation of flavor or aroma compounds, just a method of adding them later in the process than is typical.

It sounds reasonable to me. I am going to try it next weekend when I brew an IPA. I’m gonna forego my usual whirlpool in the kettle, and just do my bittering and 10 min addition. I’ll reserve 1L of wort and freeze it for a week after pitching. I’ll then use that 1L to do a hopstand, add that 1L back to the fermenter and allow fermentation to complete.

So, roughly speaking, instead of exposing the volatile aromatics to 100% of the fermentation off-gassing, I will only be exposing them to approximately 5% of the fermentation (sugars from the 1L of wort yet to ferment, instead of all 20L of the batch).