mcavers
Active Member
Not necessarily a fermentation/yeast related question, but this looks like the best place for the question. My apologies if I've put this in the wrong place.
Last night my friends and I dry-hopped an IPA that's been in secondary for about two weeks. Fermentation was finished and the beer had cleared out - OG was around 1.060 and FG somewhere around 1.012 or a bit lower. Sorry - don't have the original notes here. But you get the idea. The carboys were sitting at around 64 degrees; the yeast used was Wyeast 1450.
I usually dry-hop by adding pellets to an empty carboy and then racking beer on top of the pellets. The guys I brew with, though, opted to wait two weeks and then add the pellets to the beer so that they could sit in the beer for a final week before bottling.
Anyway, the 10 gallon batch was split between two 5 gallon carboys. When 1 oz of hop pellets (Amarillo in one, Cascade in the other) were poured in, both carboys immediately turned into beer foam volcanoes. Huge amounts of CO2 immediately were released and the foam went everywhere. Needless to say, the dry hops mostly went right back out the mouth of the carboy.
Not feeling very optimistic about this batch - I think that the clean-up process involved a fair amount of contamination risk. But my question is - WHAT HAPPENED? Why did adding hop pellets to finished beer result in a carboy volcano?
Last night my friends and I dry-hopped an IPA that's been in secondary for about two weeks. Fermentation was finished and the beer had cleared out - OG was around 1.060 and FG somewhere around 1.012 or a bit lower. Sorry - don't have the original notes here. But you get the idea. The carboys were sitting at around 64 degrees; the yeast used was Wyeast 1450.
I usually dry-hop by adding pellets to an empty carboy and then racking beer on top of the pellets. The guys I brew with, though, opted to wait two weeks and then add the pellets to the beer so that they could sit in the beer for a final week before bottling.
Anyway, the 10 gallon batch was split between two 5 gallon carboys. When 1 oz of hop pellets (Amarillo in one, Cascade in the other) were poured in, both carboys immediately turned into beer foam volcanoes. Huge amounts of CO2 immediately were released and the foam went everywhere. Needless to say, the dry hops mostly went right back out the mouth of the carboy.
Not feeling very optimistic about this batch - I think that the clean-up process involved a fair amount of contamination risk. But my question is - WHAT HAPPENED? Why did adding hop pellets to finished beer result in a carboy volcano?
