Dry Hopping with Pellets ?

I had a question regarding dry hopping with pellets. Do you add the pellets after pitching the yeast or do you wait a couple of days? Can you add it straight or is there a need for a hop bag? I was thinking of flash boiling the pellets to get the pellets disbursed and to kill of some of the nasties.

Are you using a secondary? If so, dryhop in the secondary. If you're not, wait about 14 days until you dryhop. Using a bag is optional, but I usually don't. Don't boil them, they won't infect your beer...

jiffybrew said:

I had a question regarding dry hopping with pellets. Do you add the pellets after pitching the yeast or do you wait a couple of days? Can you add it straight or is there a need for a hop bag? I was thinking of flash boiling the pellets to get the pellets disbursed and to kill of some of the nasties.

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you'll want to wait for the wort to ferment before adding the pellets to dry hop, typically a week. i just toss them right in, i think it is close to impossible to contaminate your brew with hops.

+1

What they said. You dry hop in a secondary after fermentation. I use hop pellets all the time and have found that if you put them in a "cheesecloth" ball first, it is less messy racking to the bottling bucket, but is is a biotch getting the ball out of the carboy.


Loop

Yep, I made the mistake of dry-hopping in primary once, right after pitching the yeast. It was surprising how much of the hops I had put in there ended up sitting on top of the krausen, rather than in the beer. Plus, the rapidly escaping CO2 is just blowing your desired aroma out the airlock.

I do dry hop in primary, but only in cases where I am doing a long primary (2-3 weeks) and then going straight into the keg as a secondary. Of course this means that I wait for fermentation to subside and krausen to fall, which is about when you'd be normally rack to a secondary.

I asked the same question of a few vets around here a few months ago.

I just added an ounce of Cascade pellets to my IPA in the secondary on saturday. I just throw the pellets right in about a week before I plan to rack it for bottling.

When you rack it you may want to move the carboy to wherever it needs to be for racking the night before. That way most of the hops will have dropped out to the bottom and you'll have less to filter out. I just use a clean and sanitized rubber band to wrap a small nylon mesh bag around the end of the hose.

jvh261 said:

When you rack it you may want to move the carboy to wherever it needs to be for racking the night before. That way most of the hops will have dropped out to the bottom and you'll have less to filter out. I just use a clean and sanitized rubber band to wrap a small nylon mesh bag around the end of the hose.

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Thanks everyone!
Question to JVH261, you said you used a small nylon mesh bag at the end of the hose, does that help to filter more of the hops or does it also catch some of the yeast? Do you get a clearer product? Sounds like an interesting method.

It might catch a little yeast I guess, but keeps all the hop sludge out of my bottling bucket. I haven't had a problem with anything I've bottle conditioned using that method.

If you have a funnel with a strainer that you can clamp your hose to that will work just as well if its only an ounce of hops. I've done that too, just held the funnel a little lower into the bucket at the beginning to keep it from splashing around too much.