First Wort Hopping Summary

First Wort Hopping Summary: “In the latter part of 1995, Dr. George Fix posted to the Home Brew Digest about a process he had recently come across described in the brewing literature. Since then much interest in the procedure has arisen. The process is called First Wort Hopping (FWH), and it refers to the practice of adding hops to the brew kettle, into which sparged runnings are collected, at the beginning of sparging. The idea is that the hops soak in the collecting wort (which usually runs out of the lauter tun at temperatures ranging from 60 to 70C depending on one’s setup) for the duration of the sparge, and the volatile hop constituents undergo very complicated reactions, producing a complexity of hop bitterness and aroma that is obtainable no other way.”