Moving a Carboy

OK I'm making an IPA and I opted out of secondary fermentation. To be honest, my friends and I rather like a cloudy IPA, so clarity isn't an issue for me. When this is the case, I do primary only for a few weeks. I think this helps the flavor.

Anyway, I just dry hopped it today and added my bourbon soaked toasted oak chips, and then I realized that the bench I had it on needs to be secured. I weighed the options, and I figured a ruined batch of beer is still better than a smashed carboy, so I picked it up (thank god for carboy handles and a long blow off tube) and moved it to a better place, trying to move it as little as possible. When I started, there was a nice thick layer of hops on the surface.

Sadly, as carefully as I tried to move it, I created a hurricane of hops in the beer. Almost all of them sank to the bottom, then half of them started floating up, swirling around, and some of them sank right to the bottom.

Is this something I should be concerned about? Is this going to impact the flavor of the beer or the dry hopping process at all??

I'm a complete noob, so don't listen to my answer, but I think that it's in the beer or it's not. Can't see where in the beer making any difference.

Like I said, don't listen to me lol

Sunken hops are good. After a couple days I usually give the fermenter a swirl to try to sink any floating hops...

Cheers!

To build on the original question: I ferment in my basement but for sanitation and convenience reasons will rack to secondaries, bottle, etc in the kitchen. Any issues with moving the carbons up a few stairs before bottling, etc. And if not, should I at least let it resettle for a bit. And how long?

Let it re-settle for about an hour...or better yet, move it up there a couple days before bottling.

I swirl my carboy's too when I dry hop to make sure they are nice and soaked. It does look murky but I let it settle out and no biggie.

After reading the posts here, I decided to go and give my carboy a good swirl, and boy did the hops swim!! Now I've got two layers of hops at the bottom.... lol

pferrell said:

To build on the original question: I ferment in my basement but for sanitation and convenience reasons will rack to secondaries, bottle, etc in the kitchen. Any issues with moving the carbons up a few stairs before bottling, etc. And if not, should I at least let it resettle for a bit. And how long?

Click to expand...

I do the same (i.e ferment in basement, bottle in kitchen). I just bring the fermenter up maybe an hour before I'm ready to bottle. Anything that gets stirred up that doesn't settle out in that hour will settle out in the bottles. Don't worry about it- as long as you move the fermenter carefully, you're not going to negatively affect the clarity of your final product.