presoaking dry hops to remove chlorophyll
 

Anybody doing any special techniques to remove unwanted grass character when dry hopping, like steaming or presoaking your hops in warm water?

Not talking about limiting contact time, talking about any other techniques.

Anyone?

The stuff that will dissolve the chlorophyll and remove it from the hops, will also extract the goodies you want. By stuff, I mean ethanol, and by ethanol, I mean Vodka. I think that would be true of most any other procedure.

I think the best method, is hop selection, and avoid the hops that are more grassy

Chlorophyll??? More like borophyll

Sounds about right. Stan Hieronymous also told me that older hops may be more grassy. I rarely get grassy notes from dry hops, but just happened recently and it's really something that I don't like when it's a strong character.

I have a technique for you. It's called.... wait for it..... DON'T DRY HOP!

Seriously though. I don't dry hop. You can achieve the same levels of aroma and flavor if you do massive late hop additions at 20 minutes and at flameout. There are several articles on the technique so I won't bother here. Jamil Zanischef (sp?) has some good articles on it and the main reason why breweries are now using this technique is to AVOID grassy off-flavors from dry hopping.

If you just HAVE to have that overwhelming fresh hops aroma, build a randalizer or a hop back and force your beer through it before you keg/bottle. I learned that trick from touring Stone brewing a few years ago.

I believe Hieronymus has talked about brewers dry hopping as soon as fermentation is finished and for no more than 3 days. Dry hopping for longer than that he says is useless and can introduce that vegetal chlorophyll taste.

Why bother with another technique when you can learn from the experience of others?

because every experience is not the same. there are breweries that dry hop for 14 days and they can't make enough beer to meet demand. long dry hopping does not automatically mean grassy flavors. i'm not saying that everyone should dry hop for days on end, i sure don't do that, but simply that someone else's experience with dry hopping does not mean anything for yours.

Winner

Yeah, long contact times don't automatically mean a grassy character comes out. I've had two beers recently that I dry hopped for 19 and 20something days and they were both great with no grassiness. One used Nelson Sauvin, the other a mix of Amarillo, Citra and Chinook. But a recent beer, with a mix of hops, came out grassy. I've dry hopped many, many batches and had only 2 ever come out grassy. It may be the hop variety, may be freshness. I don't know. But that heavy grassy note is unpleasant.

And why not skip dry hopping? Because it's usually awesome. 90% of the time I love it. Just looking to get rid of that rare grassy character.

a friend of mine dry hopped a beer at a cold temperature (not sure how cold) for 3 days and it was a dumper, grassy beyond imagination.