My LHBS is supposed to be ordering two one-pound bulk packages of pellet hops for me, if he can get them. He quoted $24/pound which seemed good since he is already charging $2/ounce and indications are that they will just go up in price. Anyway, at my current rate of usage they'll be gone within about six months, but I still want to store them as best I can.
I don't have a vaccuum sealing system, and even if I did, I have no way to purge the packages with nitrogen or CO2, so I have an idea that I'd like some feedback about. I was thinking that I could boil some water to rid it of chlorine and oxygen, and then use it to protect the pellets from oxygen. I would weigh one ounce of pellets, put them into a small zip-lock baggie, and add just enough water to surround and cover the pellets, and then freeze them. I don't think they'd take up much more room in the freezer, and the small amount of water would be negligible when added to the boil. Even if the pellets start to dissolve before freezing, that shouldn't matter.
Get some mason jars to store your hops. Pour some in, then put a some dry ice on top, and let it purge the air from the bottle. Then, seal the jar, and freeze. Instead of a mason jar, you could also use a beer bottle, assuming you've got a capper. With enough extra bottles lying around, you could even store your hops in the amounts that you were planning to use them. It would take up a lot of freezer space, though.
Water isn't actually an oxygen barrier. Just use either mylar bags (per my other post), or mason jars (might not work quite as well). No need to purge.
I know that water isn't an oxygen barrier, but I don't know about _ice_ which stricks me as _probably_ a better oxygen barrier than water, even if it isn't perfect. And my primary purpose with that approach wasn't to keep oxygen from passing through the plastic bags and the ice to reach the hops; it was to replace the air in the bag, which definitely contains oxygen in immediate contact with the hops, with oxygen-free water (the oxygen having been driven off during boiling) -- which I figured would buy me some time. I hoped that for only six months storage, that this approach might help. You have a valid idea about using mylar, but I'd need to purchase a sealer and the bags whereas I now have everything I need to try it the other way (storing in ice).
The dry ice (SBartz idea), aside from being a bit hard to come by, has the added problem of sometimes adding moisture to the container; I know this from personal experience when I got sucked into making some Y2K survival preparations. I bought some dry ice, broke it into pieces, dropped some of the pieces into 5 gallon food-grade buckets, filled them with rice, corn meal, etc., and sealed the buckets after allowing some time for the dry ice to evaporate and fill the buckets from the bottom up with CO2. Upon opening the buckets a year later, most of them had a small spot of moldy contents in the middle of the bottom of the bucket where the dry ice had been placed. My conclusion is that, while breaking and weighing the ice and filling the buckets, some humidity from the air must have frozen onto the dry ice, providing a small amount of concentrated moisture for the mold to form later. While the amount was very small relative to a 5-gallon bucket filled with grain, proportionately it would be much greater if I were to add just one ounce of hops to a mason jar. And while it wouldn't present a problem if I then froze the mason jars, I don't have a dedicated freezer for homebrewing, and I'd lay very good odds that while moving frozen food around in the freezer, I or my wife or son would probably manage to break the jars -- not to mention the enormous amount of wasted space they would occupy. But thanks for brainstorming this with me.
Water ~ ice. Thus fish don't suffocate when lakes freeze over and our northern neighbors have something to keep them occupied in the winter. May be somewhat less o2 permeable in its solid form, but it won't offer you any more protection than glass or heavy duty plastic.
Mason jars might be worth trying or even heavy-duty freezer bags. It's not the air in the bag that will cause a problem -- it's the constant interchange of oxygen over time. Push the air out of the bag before sealing if you are concerned.
You've already actually won half the battle by keeping the hops in a freezer. Actually for less than 6 months you might have won the whole battle.
Note that heat sealers for mylar bags are pretty cheap last I checked -- not > The Artist Formerly Known as Kap'n Salty wrote:
I buy pound of pellets at a time and break up into 1oz units. I use a Foodsaver vacuum sealer and it works great. You don't need to purge with N2, but you could purge with CO2 if you have that.. I don't bother, and it sounds like you would use then quickly enough. I toss the packets in the freezer and pull out just before use. They smell fresh when I open it.
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