I have several wild hop vines growing near me, and I'd like to try a few SMaSH brews to see what the flavour is like. I have some recipes, but they all use pellet hops.
What is a good conversion from pellet to wet hops so I can figure out how much I need to harvest and use on brew day?
Pellet hops are considered 15% more efficient at utilization than dry hops (according to Charles Faram) meaning for 100g of pellets you would need 115g of dry hops for the same recipe.
Using the information in this answer you can then convert the weight of dry hops to wet hops. The answer there says:
"Fresh hops weigh 4-6 times more than their dry counterpart, so this needs to be taken into account when weighing. For example, if you normally dry hop with 15g (1/2oz), then you'll need to wet hop with around 60-90g (2-3oz) of fresh hops."
So if you have 100g of pellet hops in your recipe, convert that to 115g dry hops then convert that to 460-690 wet hops.
I have dried dozens of batches of freshly harvested homegrown hops to learn that they average 20-25% solids or overall about 22% solids, which means the primary multiplication factor should be 4.5 (i.e., 4.5 times 0.22 = 1).
Most sources say utilization from pellets is about 10% more than whole hops. So this means the total should also be multiplied by 1.1.
1.1 times 4.5 = a grand factor of 4.95 or about 5.
I have used this factor many times, with great results.
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