dry hop experiment in a PET bottle

[fluketamer]

so i got my hands on 3 ounces of my favorite hops - mosaic and was thinking why wait for the next brew when i have plenty of kegged lager that i can hops-periment with now. i want to try to hop the beer post kegging like a randall using a pet bottle and carb cap tee pieces . i decided to try a sample in 500 ml rather than risk messing up a large amount of beer.

i put 1 hop pellet in a small piece of muslin and tied it with teflon tape. starsanned and dropped it in a 500 ml pet bottle

i applied a carb cap and purged with co2

set up my transfer lines and purged everything and attached to the keg. i couldn't take pics while slowly transferring to the bottle by slowly untightening the cap a little at a time. the beer did not like its encounter with the muslin sac . lots of foam required a very slow transfer. as an aside it was interesting how the beer could fill from the bottom with out pushing up the foam.

transfer done . all purged out and carbed to 12 psi. foam settiling. i forgot to weigh down the sac with something . next time i will put in a marble i guess.

you can see the floating hop sac here. Misha was very worried about the floating hop sac vigorously whacking the bottle to make sure i saw it . but i reassured him ill fix it next time.

cool experiment or did i just waste a half pint of lager. will it be grassy or will i get that burst of citrus that i love so much (i know its an ale hop- dont hate)

i wanted to let it go a few days but i will prolly sample this tonight with a picnic tap 2.1 (unpaid plug for trong)

cheers

 

[Somesaymybeerisdrinkable]

I'm curious how it turns out. Is one hop pellet enough? Since maximum dry hop utilization is between 4 and 8 g/l you could have used as much as 4 g in this bottle.

I wonder if attaching the muslin bag to the tube would work so the hops can be free in the bottle.

 

[fluketamer]

i tried to scale down from about 1 oz per 5 gallon but it came to 1.5 grains and my scale only goes to whole grains (haha punny) - so i decided to just put a nice big pellet in there. if i can taste the hop at all without to much grass and hopefully no extra bitterness then i will scale up to my 2.5 liter PET growler and weigh out the proportionate hops and put it in this thing:

it will fit in the neck of a standard coke bottle.
then dispense from there with a carb cap tee piece like this:

i wanted to start small with the amount of hops and work my way up . hopefully i will get some flavor form the one pellet. but your right i prolly should have started with more.

tying the bag to the dip tube is genius thanks so much i will definitely try this next time. it will allow for limited contact time cause as you drink the beer the hops will eventually come out of the liquid. i imagine i could vary the time by how high i tie it. real cool . i think i will try a few more experiments.
right now it looks great with the muslin bag weighing it down a little and i like how i can see the green hop matter nicely contained in the sac. i also like how clear the transfer came out. i dont bottle from the keg but i think i might now seeing how clear the beer transfers with zero sediment.

thanks for the tip.

 

[Broken Crow]

so i got my hands on 3 ounces of my favorite hops - mosaic and was thinking why wait for the next brew when i have plenty of kegged lager that i can hops-periment with now. i want to try to hop the beer post kegging like a randall using a pet bottle and carb cap tee pieces . i decided to try a sample in 500 ml rather than risk messing up a large amount of beer.
View attachment 833538
i put 1 hop pellet in a small piece of muslin and tied it with teflon tape. starsanned and dropped it in a 500 ml pet bottle
View attachment 833539
i applied a carb cap and purged with co2
View attachment 833540
set up my transfer lines and purged everything and attached to the keg. i couldn't take pics while slowly transferring to the bottle by slowly untightening the cap a little at a time. the beer did not like its encounter with the muslin sac . lots of foam required a very slow transfer. as an aside it was interesting how the beer could fill from the bottom with out pushing up the foam.
View attachment 833541
transfer done . all purged out and carbed to 12 psi. foam settiling. i forgot to weigh down the sac with something . next time i will put in a marble i guess.

View attachment 833542
you can see the floating hop sac here. Misha was very worried about the floating hop sac vigorously whacking the bottle to make sure i saw it . but i reassured him ill fix it next time.

cool experiment or did i just waste a half pint of lager. will it be grassy or will i get that burst of citrus that i love so much (i know its an ale hop- dont hate)

i wanted to let it go a few days but i will prolly sample this tonight with a picnic tap 2.1 (unpaid plug for trong)

cheers

Nice! Thanks for posting..I'm gonna try that sometime. I'm wondering if a spunding valve might better supress foam than loosening the cap.

 

[fluketamer]

update - this worked well i can definitely taste the added mosaic. however i definitely need to add more hops next time. also i think a lot of aroma and flavor was left in the hop sac afterward. im going to try to leave much more space in the sac next time to hopefully give the hops more space to expand in order to fully extract the flavor.