Dry hopping with pellets?

Is it ok to do this?I acidentally ordered 2 ozes of cascade pellets instead of plugs. Can I still dry hop with this?

Thanks

 

Yes definitely. I've just poured the pellets straight into the carboy and then siphoned a little more carefully when bottling time came around and it turned out great. I have a friend who uses muslin bags for his dry hops and they work well too.

 

Do I need to sterilize them first?

 

Do you mean sanitize? I never have. I just toss them in straight from the bag. I also try not to let them get otherwise exposed to anything else (i.e., quickly open bag & dump all of them in), but that might not be completely necessary. By the time you're adding dry hops, you don't exactly have a hospitable environment in your fermented beer for most bugs, and hops prevent the nasties from getting a foothold anyway, so it's probably safe to just toss them in and not worry much.

 

I agree with just dumping the pellets in. As for the siphoning, just put a nylon sock over the end of your siphon. I actually use a dryer screen with a nylon knee high sock.

 

Only dry hopped once, but I just dumped the bag of pellets in, nothing bad happened and the beer tasted great.

I'm dry hopping again this friday, and I'm just going to dump again. As for siphoning, the last time the hops just floated on top, so I just siphoned from below and didn't get anything in the finished beer.

 

You should be fine. I used to do it all the time before I kegged. Now I keg hop. One key I found to dry hopping with pellets is if you can find a way to cold crash the beer, this helps out tremendously to aid with forming a nice compact sediment of hops at the bottom of the fermenter. Then you can just rack over top of that without getting any hop particles in your bottling bucket.

 

I dh with pellets all the time. I just either add them to primary in the last week of my 20 day primary, or if I am racking to secondary I just dump them right in the carboy and rack on top of them. No need to sanitize them if the package hasn't been opened.

 

I usually sanitize a nylon mesh bag and put the pellets into that for dry hopping. That way the mesh bag acts as a filter when you transfer to your kegs/bottling bucket.

 

Just wanted to vent about pellets. I hate them and will never use them again. Aside from storage issues, I just don't see the point of using anything other than whole hops.

But I understand that I am in the minority on this.

Whew, that felt great.......

 

There are a lot of hop varieties I can't find in whole hop form. At my LHBS they only carry both whole and pellet hops in the most common varieties (ie cascade). Even shopping online your choices are limited if you will only use whole hops.