tota76,

I FWH a lot. I just pull the bag out after mashing is complete. BEFORE, I squeeze the bag or anything else. I dump the FWH (First Wort Hops) or bittering hops into the kettle "loose". The trick is to have the hops in the water as the wort rises to the boil. Something "Magical" happens during the rise? No one knows why or how?

The rest of the hops go in as scheduled. I use a hop spider and bag to do late hops and pull them out before No-chilling. I no-chill everything. The loose FWH hops stay in the pot, usually stuck to the sides at the high point of the boil. If the loose hops go into the wert? So what? You boiled them for 90 minutes so they are used up! They will just be added to the break material.

tota76,

The IBU's of the FWH is the same as hops put in for 60 minutes. You don't get more IBU's by boiling longer. There is only so much in there. So compute it as if you put them in at 60 minutes. First wort hopping makes the bitterness smoother and less harsh (so they say?) I use the process most of the time just to simplify things for me. I can't say that it is really better because I have such a bad sense of taste. (I don't smell very good)

As I said before. The First Wort Hops are dumped in loose. So they are completely used up. I find that as the water evaporates the hops stick to the side of the kettle at the level of the most violent boil. I bet 50% are left in the wort by the end of boil. Just count the IBU's as regular.

Tota,

Please see below. I got this from a post Pistol Patch had a while back. Can't find the link now but had the sense to save the info to my computer when i saw it that time.

"Here's how...

Converting a 'Normal' Recipe to FWH

1. Work out your total Alpha Acid Units (different from IBU's).
2. Move 30-50% of those 'Alpha Acid Units' from late additions (flavour and aroma additions) to FWH.
3. Take from the latest addition first

For example, let's say your original recipe had a hop bill of...

50 grams Tettnang @ 5% AA @ 60 minutes (AAU = 50 x 5 = 250)
25 grams Tettnang @ 5% AA @ 20 minutes (AAU = 25 x 5 = 125)
25 grams Tettnang @ 5% AA @ 5 minutes (AAU = 50 x 5 = 125)

As all the above AA%'s are the same, this is easy. Thirty to fifty percent of the total AAU equals 30-50 grams. I'm going to choose to FWH at 40% so my new hop bill becomes...

40 grams Tettnang @ 5% AA @ FWH (Alpha Acids = 200
50 grams Tettnang @ 5% AA @ 60 minutes
10 grams Tettnang @ 5% AA @ 5 minutes

Note that I have 'stolen' from the latest addition first and that the entire hop bill weight remains unchanged.

A More Advanced Example

Let's say the original hop bill was...

50 grams Cascaded @ 6.8% AA @ 60 minutes
25 grams East Kent Goldings @ 5% AA @ 20 minutes
25 grams Styrian Goldings @ 3.3% AA @ 5 minutes

Here's the total Alpha Acid Units of the hop bill...

50 x 6.8 = 340
25 x 5 = 125
25 x 3.3 = 82.5
Total = 547.5

Let's say I just want to move 30% of the Alpha Acid Units to FWH's...

30% x 547.5 = 164.25

Straight away, I can see that I need to move all of the Styrian Goldings to FWH. This still leaves 81.75 units to move which I will take away from the Easy Kent Goldings.

81.75 / 5 = 16.35 grams of EKG that need to be moved to FWH.

So my FWH bill is now...

25 grams Styrian Goldings @ 3.3% AA @ FWH
16.35 grams East Kent Goldings @ 5% AA @ FWH
50 grams Cascaded @ 6.8% AA @ 60 minutes
8.65 grams East Kent Goldings @ 5% AA @ 20 minutes

Other Options

The principles above come from an article that George Fix put out in 1995. You can change the rules as much as you like though.

For example, you might decide that you would like to FWH at 40%. In the advanced example above, this would mean stealing from your 60 minute addition. You may choose to do this or not. In principle you wouldn't as this would add more flavour and aroma than you are calculating for.

Another extreme is where the brewer FWH's 30-50% of every addition. I suspect that they did this because they didn't really understand the original principles above. But, there could also be good reasons for doing this as long as you remember that FWH'ing any of your bittering addition will also add flavour and aroma.

For me personally, if experimenting with this, I would choose a recipe you know and drink regularly. Move all your flavour and aroma hops to FWH as long as this does not exceed 50%. I think this is the place to start if you can."

Looks good Tota,

Keep us informed as to how it turns out.