On my journey to growing my own hops I wondered, when I finally get these things how do I determine the usage quantity? I cannot tell what the alpha acid content is. I don’t know any of the information that is required to determine how much to use. Do I just wing it and hope for the best?
Once you have dried them, I think you should be able to use the same weight \ quantity as you typically would for the same variety of hop.
If you’ve let them hang a good long time so they develop full oil content, then I’d agree that you can use the low end of the normal range. What I did was to brew a couple of IPAs and just use the heck out of them. On the last one we literally had to wring the wort out of the hops.
you could also send them to a place like Hopunion to get analyzed for alpha/beta acid content, as well as the other aromatic compounds.
