When dry hopping can you add in at pitching or should you wait til the final gravity?

I'm reading this article:

http://www.brewingkb.com/recipes/Ho...A-Recipe-the-real-thing-not-a-clone-1727.html

I want to make this IPA for 4th of July and I'm already scared its going to be too late which is fine, I can take it with me to another party two weeks later. The question I had is it refers to dry hopping after fermentation is done, is this necessary? I'm just starting and need to read a lot more but I did this for my pale ale and I'm actually kinda curious what difference it would have made now that i see this in another recipe.

You want to wait with dry hopping. If you dry hop when you pitch the yeast, the fermentation will blow off a lot of that wonderful hop aroma you get from dry hopping.

The purpose of dry hopping is to impart all the wonderful aromas that come from the hops that get cooked off by the heat during and immediately after the boil. Since aroma compounds, by nature, are very volatile. Any degassing of the beer is going to force out these compounds. During fermentation, there is a lot of CO2 released. We don't want our precious hop aroma to go with it.

I add the hops, as pellets, to my primary fermenter a week before I bottle. This is after at least two weeks of fermentation. I just toss them in and filter them out with a hop bag when I bottle.

If you want to really push it, go 10 days fermentation and five dry hop, then bottle. You'd make it by the Fourth, but the beer would not be it's best.

Yes wait. You don't usually want to dry hop for more than 10 days or you can start to get some grassy flavors from the hops. If you are bottling your probably not going to make the 4th, I'd wait for the next party. If you have a keg maybe you can do it. I like to ferment my IPA's for 2 weeks the add my hops to the primary for 7-10 days, then I keg it and let it carb/condition for 2 weeks. You can carb faster if you force carb in the keg.

I can force carb in kegs, I've got a lot of cornelius kegs. Thanks guys for the responses. I am kinda curious how much better the pale ale I made would be if I had waited.

Now I just need to find the list of hops I need since the local brew shop doesn't carry them, I'm screwed and can't do my brew day tomorrow.

It's hard to wait, but I could definitely taste the difference when I learned to be patient. Good luck with your search for hops and brew day. Hope it turns out great for the party!