Dry Hopping & Cold Crashing {conflicted}

[RandallFlag]

I have run into an issue that I haven't witnessed before and I am conflicted on how to proceed.

Situation
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I have read many of these forums and they advocate for dry hopping no long than 5 to 7 days. I can't speak to the veracity of those claims but I am working on the assumption that prolonged, secondary dry hopping will lead to off flavors.

So...I dry hopped for 7 days and then cold crashed. And after cold crashing for 3 days I brought the carboy out with minimal disruption and was waiting to bottle. It's been 3 days now and the beer is still cloudy. The majority (95%) of the hops have settled.

Should I go back to a cold crash?
Bottle and let the sediment settle in the bottle?
Leave it on the bench and continue to wait?

Appreciate any help here? Thanks

 

[Xpertskir]

7-10 days of room temp dry hopping is my standard, cold crash is typically 1-3 days and the absorption of any flavor at those temps is miniscule. I Should sya that's 1-3 days at ~34dg, a lot of people would never even get down to 34 in 1 day depending on their set up(passively vs actively cooling).

In the future I'd bottle as soon as you pull the fermenter out of the cold crash, but there will be no harm done If you bottle soon.

 

[kpr121]

What temperature were you crashing at? I’ve found that theres a big difference between say 40F and 33-35F, the colder you get it the better it will clear. One beer that I left out in the garage for a little too long (week) started to form ice on the top and it was one of the clearest I’ve ever made.

With that said, if it were me and I had the time I would let it crash for a while longer (if I were set on getting a clear beer, which often times I dont care much). Get it as close to freezing as you can.

Sometimes its not just about cold crashing, there may be other issues going on in the brewing process that lend to a cloudy wort (water, mash ingredients, etc).

How has clarity been on other beers you’ve made?

Another point: Seems like some people crash first, then dry hop. With the idea that the crashing particles could pull some of the hop flavors/aroma oils with them. I don’t know if I totally buy that but on the next DIPA I do I think I will be employing that technique. How long to dry hop would depend on whether you warm it back up or not. Will have to either let it get back up to room temp for a normal 5-7 day dry hop or if left at serving temp leave the hops in there a little longer.

 

[RandallFlag]

What temperature were you crashing at?

How has clarity been on other beers you’ve made?

Good questions. For some reason my little fridge only made it down to just around 40 deg F. I think it's about to die. The previous beers have been very clear. Like you mentioned, I'm not concerned with super-clear clarity since I'm not submitting this DIPA to anyplace other than my mouth. However, this beer is just hazy.

I think I was looking for someone to convince me to go back to the cold crash machine for a while longer and see what drops out. You may have just done that.

 

[IslandLizard]

Some yeasts stay suspended longer than others, so a few more days of cold crashing will help to clarify. Using finings like gelatin speeds things up, but may take some hop flavor and aroma with them.

I had an ESB that stayed cloudy for months, not sure why that was, although the Burton water profile may have played a part in it. Even the last pint poured was still not clear.

What you could do next time is cold crash (with finings if needed) until clear, then dry hop. Most of us who keg do it in that order, and dry hopping is done in the keg with a muslin bag.

If you do that I would rack the clear beer into a secondary before dry hopping, that allows you to agitate the beer/hop sack a bit while dry hopping.

And +1 on the lower temperature. Close to freezing does miracles. That was one of the reasons that ESB wasn't clearing, the fridge was giving up the ghost, slowly.

 

[kombat]

The problem is that you let it warm back up. In my experience, if I cold crash a beer, then let it warm back up, I get lots of little CO2 "geysers" bursting out of the yeast/trub cake at the bottom, which clouds the beer back up. The solution is to bottle immediately after removing the fermenter from the cold storage, before the beer has a chance to warm back up. The reason this happens is because CO2 is less soluble in warm beer, so as the beer warms, CO2 must effervesce out of solution.

But to answer your question, as another poster mentioned, dry hopping effectiveness diminishes drastically at colder temperatures, so I would not be worried at all about hops sitting in cold beer for weeks, even months. But I wouldn't go more than a week or two (tops) at room temperature.

I've posted my personal IPA "clarifying and dry hopping" protocol elsewhere, but here's a quick summary of how I maximize effectiveness of the dry hops while also achieving great clarity.

• Ferment beer for 14-21 days
• Move carboy into fridge to cold-crash. 1 day later, add gelatin. Wait 3-5 days.
• Remove carboy from fridge and immediately rack to a 5 gallon carboy. Drop in dry hops. Leave the carboy out of the fridge, at room temperature, to warm up. Wait 7-10 days.
• Move carboy back into fridge to cold-crash again, but NO GELATIN this time. Wait 3-5 days.
• Rack beer to keg, put keg in keezer on CO2 to carb up.

The trick is that gelatin can strip hop oils out of the beer, thus contradicting the whole point of dry hopping. So you want to dry hop AFTER you've done your main clarification task. But cold-crashing alone shouldn't noticeably diminish the hop aroma. The second cold crash will still leave the beer slightly cloudy, but that cloudiness is from those wonderful, desirable dry hop oils/particles. That's flavour. That's not the same as "chill haze," yeast haze, or other undesirable clouding that you typically want to eliminate from your beer. Plus, a little haze is to style for IPAs, particularly highly-hopped ones.

 

[mkyl428]

I tend not to care much if my dry hopped beers are hazy, since dry hopping causes a haze I just accept it as part of dry hopping a beer and move on, it's not going to make the beer taste any different to get it more clear, and I will only have to wait longer to get that hoppy goodness in my belly....

I'm just not okay with that

 

[bobbrews]

There are dozens of reasons for a cloudy beer when not intended, some of which include:

*Stirring up the trub and not letting gravity work for you
*Poor racking procedure
*Poor filtering methods
*Proteins from the malt formed a loose bond with polyphenols from hops
*Poor hot break and never achieving a full rolling boil
*Infection or dead yeast
*Using a ton of oily late hops and dryhops
*Bottling too quickly, e.g. 7 days after brewday.

We can't really diagnose your clarity issue for you. The use of gelatin, polyclar, use of a secondary, or techniques like cold crashing will help with clarity, but many people brew clear beers without these methods.

 

[RandallFlag]

The problem is that you let it warm back up. In my experience, if I cold crash a beer, then let it warm back up, I get lots of little CO2 "geysers" bursting out of the yeast/trub cake at the bottom, which clouds the beer back up.

YEP!!!! This sounds just like what happened. I was looking at it the next day and was like "what's up with all the surface to air missiles in my carboy!?!"

 

[azazel1024]

Well, I can't really speak to what to do this time, but for the future, consider a hop bag for dry hopping. I had always used one, but the last two times I tried just throwing in pellet hops, which led to more sediment in the bottle even with a little cold crashing and the last time leaf hops, which led to a little leaf material getting sucked in to my bottling bucket, despite my best attempts.

Also a bit more wasted beer that I couldn't siphon out without sucking up more material.

Hop bag with a carefully cleaned ladel/stirring spoon keeps from making a mess in the beer/extra sediment and it also allows me to press out some of the beer that the hops soaked up (or it happens naturally with a carboy pulling the hop bag out squeezing up through the neck).

 

[kombat]

consider a hop bag for dry hopping. [...] it also allows me to press out some of the beer that the hops soaked up (or it happens naturally with a carboy pulling the hop bag out squeezing up through the neck).

The one and only time I tried dry-hopping in a hop sock in a carboy, that thing swelled up and there was absolutely no way it was coming back out the neck of that carboy. I had to rack the beer to a fresh carboy, then basically empty the hop sock inside the carboy so I could get it out, then clean all the hop material out of the carboy. Never again. Dry hops go directly into the carboy. Cold crash for a few days and they'll either drop right to the bottom or float on top. You can easily siphon from in-between.

 

[wardens355]

It is my understanding that chill haze takes several weeks or so to settle without the aid of gelatin, polyclar, etc. I had a lager that took about 2 months to clear up without any finings (while another batch of the same lager w/ different yeast took only 2 weeks or so, no finings). As others have stated, dry hopping can impart haze as well. If you absolutely want very clear beer quickly, I would add fining agent/s at the end of your cold crash, give it a couple more days, then bottle or keg.

Keep in mind there are some folks who think finings remove some of the beneficial hop oils/particles in big hoppy beers, so as stated previously, you may want to cold crash and add finings, then let the beer warm to room temperature and dry hop. Then cold crash again and package.

Of course, people have all sorts of opinions on this, so whatever you end up doing and liking should be sufficient!

 

[Roadie]

Seems like you have it figured out with letting it warm back up.

You did mention that is was a DIPA so don't forget sometimes no matter what you do you will end up with some hop haze on heavily dry hopped beers. I've made a PtY clone and learned to live with a little hop haze.

 

[azazel1024]

The one and only time I tried dry-hopping in a hop sock in a carboy, that thing swelled up and there was absolutely no way it was coming back out the neck of that carboy. I had to rack the beer to a fresh carboy, then basically empty the hop sock inside the carboy so I could get it out, then clean all the hop material out of the carboy. Never again. Dry hops go directly into the carboy. Cold crash for a few days and they'll either drop right to the bottom or float on top. You can easily siphon from in-between.

It may help that I usually don't dry hop with a lot and have mostly been using pellets recently.

At least in my better bottles it works fine. I also have fairly skinny hop socks. I forget the measurements on them, but laid flat, I'd say around 3"x10", give or take a little. Even when swollen they'll fit back up. They are a bit bigger than the opening, but I just have to gently keep pulling and they'll fit back up through while maybe squeezing out 30-50% or so of the beer they've soaked up.

I have once or twice had them be stuck where I had to empty the hop sock in the carboy, but that was when using marbles in there to try to weight it down. Now I just let it float on top and swirl the carboy gently once a day. Seems to work okay.

I'll play around with it a little. Until recently (as in days ago) I had no way to cold crash, now that I have a temp controlled fermentation chamber, I can try cold crashing to see if it changes hop behavior.

 

[edroberts]

I've always dry hopped in primary a few days after reaching terminal gravity then cold crashed. However, this topic has come up in 3 or 4 different posts in the last couple of weeks. As such, I decided to go the opposite route this time around: Cold crash, rack to secondary cold, then dry hop at room temp. I plan to bottle this weekend so I'll get a feel as to how it goes. In theory, I'd expect to end up with more aroma than crashing afterwords.

I've seen the "yeast volcanoes" myself, so I'm glad I racked to secondary beforehand. That said, I still expect to have cloudiness in using over 2+ oz of dry hop in a 5 gal batch anyway.