Measuring Hops For Home Brewing Amber Beer

"Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this next segment, we are going to talk about how we measure hops and how we move through some of our early boil operations. Now, in terms of measuring out your hops, you can either use an eyeball technique which "eh, if I fold it right here, I'd end up with about ...that will give me half." Or you can actually use a scale which will give you a much more accurate result. This isn't rocket science, it doesn't have to be perfect; using your eye will be good enough. Now we are going to add some of our hops to our hop sack in preparation for our boil. Once again, without measuring exactly, that's roughly half which is what I was looking for so I'm going to tie that off. Or you can fill up your nylon grain bags, which can also double as hop sacks. Now that we've got a good rolling boil, we're going to go ahead and add our first hops. Get those nice and saturated under. And then, we are going to start our timer. Once again, we are going to boil for a full sixty minutes, so this is going to be important. As you continue your boil, you're just going to continue to make sure you keep a nice rolling boil. Stir it occasionally, to get your hops mixed up and also make sure that there's no scalding on the bottom. With about twenty minutes left in the boil, I'm going to start adding in the rest of the malt extract. Now, I could actually take it off the head and add it off to the side, but I like to keep this nice rolling boil going. So I'm just going to add it very, very slowly and keep stirring the whole time while I'm adding it. Another tip that you may not see other places: to get the most out of your extract container is to take a little dip into your pot with a nice clean jar and pour it into your container. Very gently, trying to minimize the, gently swirl it around to help dissolve the rest of the sugars that are in there and then pour it back into your mix."