What is a hop ball? What can I do with it?

The hop ball is a pretty cool little tool for any homebrewer. It has a few uses. You may use it to place your hops in during the boil, keeping all but the alpha acids from the hops inside the ball. Unlike using nylon bags for this purpose, the hop ball allows more of the hop flavor to come through for better utilization.

If have a couple of them on hand, you can also use one to place your additives in, such as orange peel and cardamom seed. This allows you to extract the flavor from these agents during the boil, and keep them out of the fermenter.

Another cool use for the hop ball is to place it inside a keg of beer. What happens is that the hop ball sinks to the bottom of the keg, which is right where the beverage out tube is at. Then all of the beer drawn off of the keg goes through the hops, giving your beer the freshest hop flavor and aroma.