Dry Hopping

[ratinator]

My dry hopping experience over about 8 years of brewing:

-Hops drop out naturally over time, wiggling the carboy helps this process happen

-Throwing hops directly into beer and not cold crashing results in hop particle in beer. Reason for this is sometimes after 7 days of dry hopping the hops have still not settled and most people dry hop 3-5 days to avoid grassy off flavors. Filtering would have to be done prior to bottling/kegging

-muslim bags don't provide great contact and ballon in carboys which makes it a pain

-unless your doing a pressurize fermentation or transfer, shaking, stirring or running beer through strainers or bags all has potential of introducing oxygen into beer that suffer the worst from it.

-when I toss hops directly in beer and cold crash, by day 5 everything has sunk and is tightly packed on bottom and easy to rack off of without getting hop particle in beer

I have a 2 tap kegerator so I dont have means of cold crash due to space. My solution at this point is using these:
https://www.amazon.com/Happybrew-St..._a_1_2?keywords=dry+hop&qid=1579585631&sr=8-2

They work well even using 3oz of hops and I put marbles in them and stand them up. They would require a wide mouth carboy or I have been siphoning from a primary bucket to a secondary bucket and then gelatin in keg. Not really sure how people think cold crashing doesn't help the hops drop. Definately works for me

 

[HopsAreGood]

After dry hopping endless ways over the last few years, this is what I like best and have been using most recently.

1. Place your loose dry hops into the bottom of a keg that is equipped with a floating dip tube/clear beer draft system.

2. Close the top. Purge the keg a few times to get most of the oxygen out.

3. Ferment your beer as you normally would with a QD/tubing that runs the Co2 into the keg with your dry hops, and then out into a jug of star San. Bye the end of fermentation the keg is free of oxygen.

4. Soft crash your fermenter to about 60 degrees with some soft positive co2 pressure. (2-3 psi)

5. Perform a closed transfer into the keg.

6. Shake, rattle and roll the keg with all of its loose dry hops, under pressure, as much as you like, for as long as you like.

7. Crash the beer down to your preferred temp. I like around 42-44. Let it sit still for 1-2 days.

8. Jump the beer via co2 into a serving keg that has been filled and dispensed with star San. 99% of the hop material is at the bottom of the keg, and because you are using a floating dip tube you are drawing from the top, as far away as you can get from the settled hop mass on the bottom of the keg.

9. Monitor the transfer closely and as soon as you see any thing close to hop material/trub in the transfer tubing, stop the transfer. You are at the bottom. Any little bit that does get into the serving keg will settle to the bottom...no big deal.

This has been working great for me. Aroma and flavor are incredible.

 

[Jag75]

Now that's using your dipstick!^^^^^^