First Wort Hopping

[JonGoku]

First Wort Hopping! I stumbled onto this technique today and figured I'd share it with the board. No doubt this concept is not unfamilure to the veteran brewers here, but as I was unable to find any talk about it other then a brief reference in one of Lyn's old posts so I figured I'd bring it into the light.

This article I read was very enlightening.

Anyways, how commonly is it practiced? Has anyone in our club experimented with it? I'm still yet to go AG so it does not yet apply to my processes, but the notion intrigues me.

Cheers!

Edit: Grammar!

[brahn]

I've done it a number of times. It smells great while the wort is running off.

It brings up a lot of questions about what flavor contribution it provides and how many IBU's it provides. Some people treat FWH hops like a 20 minute addition with regards to bitterness, others count the full time that the hops are in boiling wort. When I've done it, I've treated them as a 20 minute addition, but the styles I was brewing were supposed to be fairly bitter. I don't think I've ever tried brewing the same recipe with and without FWH to see how they compare.

Denny Conn did run an experiment and had the beer analyzed by a lab. The FWH contributed more IBU's to the beer than a 60 minute hop addition, but it didn't necessarily taste more bitter. The only summary I could find of the experiment in a quick search is starting on page 29 of this pdf:

http://www.beertown.org/events/hbc/pres ... nyConn.pdf

[brahn]

BTW, here's the original article that the page you pointed to is summarizing:

http://www.franklinbrew.org/brewinfo/brauweltfwh.html

The formatting seems a little wonky, I had to view it in IE to let me read the whole thing.

[backyard brewer]

I've done it a number of times. i like the results, seems to be a smoother bitterness. I treat it as a 20 minute addition.