Hops with the priming sugar?

I'm brewing an IPA and my boy has recommended dry hopping. I read somewhere that some people boil a hop bag along with the priming sugar just before bottling instead. Has anyone else done this. What do you all think? Not quite a week yet in the primary so I still have time to decide. Thanks.

I would think that this is a little counter-productive. The purpose of dry hopping is to get the aromas from the hops that are lost during boiling. I would say just transfer the beer over to the secondary and throw in about an ounce of your finishing hops without boiling.

Something similar to this that is useful is making a "hop tea" and adding it to the secondary to adjust bitterness, but from what I gather, this is not the case here.

Brewsmith said:

I would think that this is a little counter-productive. The purpose of dry hopping is to get the aromas from the hops that are lost during boiling.

Click to expand...

I initially thought the same thing, but if you only boil it for a couple of minutes, the hops will only lend their aroma to the beer.

It seems like it should work just fine and would avoid the whole mess of having the hops in the fermenter, but... damnit... dry hops floating in a carboy looks so damn cool.

I'm still wondering on the effectiveness of it though. Would it really be tthe same as dry hopping in the end?

I know what we need...

A HBT test brewery so we can do side by side brews and test these things. We can all run it each say, one week a year and rotate so it's constantly staffed. I'm sure we can all contribute some equipment to get it up and running.

Boiling hops or just adding them to hot water, changes the profile of oils extracted and/or evaporated. It will add flavor and aroma, but not the exact ones you would get by dry hopping. Keep the boil under 5 minutes. Since it's an IPA and if you use Cascades, I don't think the difference would be large.

I have the ability to split the brew to two secondaries......I'll dry hop the one and boil some hops in the priming sugar for the second and see what happens.