Wow, wow, wow! Steven Deeds (Author of Brewery Engineering and the Woodland Brew blog) has detailed a way to create isomerized hop extract using nothing more than water, hops and a pressure cooker in 15 minutes.
-He uses this technique to massively accelerate his extract brew days while still getting amazing utilization out of his hops AND using far less energy as you only need to boil a small quantity of water for this process vs. the whole volume of wort.
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/bittering-hops-in-15-minutes.html
We've long heard that you can only dissolve about 100 IBUs worth of isomerized alpha acids into wort, well because of the higher ph of water you can actually dissolve about 1000 IBUs into just distilled water. -Then when you add it to your main beer batch it obviously gets dilluted.
But under the increased temps of boiling in a pressure cooker the hops get fully isomerized in 25 minutes; 15 minutes is a rough equivalent to a 60 minute boil.
Adam
That's great
Looks like a project for all the leftover hop from an all grain brew . Excellent !