We don’t brew much in the summer. We don’t have air conditioning, so boiling 5 gallons of wort for hours in the kitchen is just sorta terrible when it’s hot outside.

So we’ve been on a bit of a brewing hiatus, but at some point over the summer, I thought it’d be a good idea to throw some whole cone hops into the keg of Cascade SMaSH I made earlier this year. That one turned out pretty weak, and we hadn’t used most of last year’s hop harvest, so I added maybe an ounce of hops in a weighted bag and tossed it into the keg, just to see what might happen.

Flavor-wise, this didn’t do much. The beer still wasn’t very good, and I think the hops may have just been too old to add much character — they’d been in the freezer for about 8 months at this point. I decided to dump the beer next time I had a chance to work on the kegerator.

… a few months pass…

In November, we picked up a keg of Boulevard Tank 7. I took a day to clean all the kegerator hardware, the tap lines, and all our homebrew kegs.

I finally dumped the SMaSH and tossed the spent hops down my kitchen sink.

This was a bad idea. I significantly overestimated the capabilities of my garbage disposal.

Yeah. Wet hops will clog the hell out of your drain. I wasn’t able to snake it myself and had to bring in a plumber (who ended up having to bring in a second plumber to assist). Anyways shoutout to John’s Drains for fixing me up and DO NOT PUT HOPS IN YOUR DRAIN.