The grains were mix and match based on leftovers from the year. Most of it was two kinds of base malt, with about a pound or two of other kinds of malt for added flavor and color. According to calculators, we basically built a pale ale style.
Fresh hops are wasted at the beginning of the boil, so we used pellet cascade and saaz for bittering. As soon as the boil started, we got the ladder out and began the hops harvest.
The hallertau vines decided they needed more climbing space well before we had a chance to add to the upper reaches of our trellis system. Thus we opted for the hooptie method of stringing coir rope into the upper canopy of a nearby redbud tree. Hopefully this situation will be remedied next year.
Fresh hops - and I mean freshly picked hops - are about 80% water, so you need a significantly greater weight of fresh hops than dry. It appeared a good proportion was around 2.5-3 oz per 5 gallons. We ended up with about 2.5 oz of hops ready to harvest, so that worked out well.
While fresh hops should be added at the end of boil, I opted for 10 minutes to end since who knew what kind of buggies or critters had been crawling over the blossoms. A 10 minute sanitation seemed like a good plan.
We allowed the fresh hops to transfer with the wort into the fermentation bucket. In about a week we'll rack into a secondary to strain them out.
There will be more to harvest this year - of the hallertau, as well as some saaz and nugget. These will probably be dried and stored in a freezer, rather than added fresh-off-the-vine. (Which means I need to add "build drying screens" to my August calendar.)
BTW, Sunrise has a few gallon pots of nugget hop vines.
-Sally
