Whether you’ve grown your own hops or you have brewer-gardener friends sharing theirs, making beer with homegrown hops is a treat. It’s easy to use them as flavor or aroma additions, but bittering is a challenge because they don’t come labeled with their alpha-acid percentage (AA%). If your harvest is big enough, you could pay a lab to analyze the hops, but that doesn’t feel very “homebrew-like.” That’s why most people just wing it with a recipe and see how it turns out, likely taking at least a couple of batches to get a feel for the hopping level.
If you’re thinking, “There’s got to be a better way,” you’re absolutely right.
The trick is using hop teas. Brewing and comparing teas uses much less of your valuable harvest, and you get the results today instead of weeks down the road, waiting for a test beer to finish. On the surface, it’s a pretty simple idea: you just need to compare your homegrown hops with some known quantities. But the devil is in the details.