Fresh / wet hopping in the bottle

[Christian]

Got a pathetic 6 small hops from my hops vines (first year + probably some other factors).

Thinking about putting these directly in a couple of bottles of my IPA that I'm bottling this evening - are there any infection risks from this approach (i.e. from the hops neither being kilned or boiled)?

No big deal if I lose a few bottles to an experiment but thought I'd check first.

Cheers!

[Soren]

there shouldn't be any risk of infection as long as you treat the hops with care. during drying of the hops they don't reach temperatures high enough to kill any bacteria, so this should be just like dry hopping. putting them in the bottle will creat another problem though: when you open the bottle, the co2 will have nucleation points on the hop, which will make the beer gush out of the bottle. or at least that happens with pellets in the bottle, I've learned that the hard way... interesting experiment though, try it.

[Christian]

Thanks Soren,

I'll give it a go. I dry hopped the same recipe in some bottles a few months ago using a range of pellets and didn't have any gushers - the bits of hop everywhere were anoying but it was great at illustrating the effect of dry hopping with a particular variety).

By the way, recently had a couple of pints of Hopwired at the Freehouse and it's a stunner - easy in my top 5 beers of all time. My last IPA had a very similar hop profile because I dry hopped with Sauvin (as a result of the dry hop experiment described above) so I'm quite pleased with myself!