First Wort Hopping v. Hot Break problem

[billvelek]

I decided to try first wort hopping. The problem is that I am accustomed to skimming the hot break off of my wort prior to boil. Now that I'm in the middle of this, I noticed that the foam forming on top of the wort (hot break) also contains hops that I've added already. There is obviously no way to separate them while skimming. If I remove much hops with the hot break, I'll mess up my hop schedule because some of the hops will miss the boil and I won't have the same utilization, so now I face some urgent questions: Should I stir the hot break and hops back into the boil rather than skimming? ... or should I skim as usual and forget about that hop addition re bittering hops and just add new hops like I usually do? For future reference, should I have used a hop bag to prevent the hops from floating up with the hot break? Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Bill Velek

[slothrob]

Well, I'm too late to help now and I wouldn't have had any real advice for you anyway. I don't skim so I don't know what the effect would be. I only use hop bags occasionally and I don't think I've ever used one to FWH, but that sounds like a logical solution.

What did you end up doing last night?

[billvelek]

Because I could never be sure that I would remove all of the hops while skimming, I figured that adding new hops would probably give me more than what the recipe called for, plus new hops would be in addition to whatever IBUs were already derived from the FWH. I'd also never really know how much hops were really used, so I decided to just stir it in. No problem, but now I'll have more trub. If I would have thought it through first, I probably would never have posted my message in the first place, but might have asked later if a hop bag is needed for FWH for just that reason.

Thanks for the reply.

Cheers.

Bill Velek