Hello, greetings to everyone. This is my first time posting, but I have been reading tons of threads on here throughout my entire brew so thank you all for the wonderful information so far.
I have my very first beer in secondary fermentation in a 5 gallon glass carboy currently, I plan to bottle in roughly five days. I started out with a chinook single hop Brew kit from Northern Brewer and spruced it up a bit with my own additions of hops (mosaic and chinook in the boil, dry hopped with galaxy, cascade, and mt.hood so far) and a slight boost of DME (1/2 lb) to hopefully raise ABV.
The idea is to pack as much hop flavor and aroma as possible into it while hopefully raising the projected abv from 5.5 to at least 6.0, hopefully higher. Most of my hop additions were pellets but I have 1oz of whole cone Cascade in muslin bags that have been sitting in there for about four days. I want to add one final infusion of simcoe that will sit until bottling and I’m thinking about pulling out the cascade in order to make room for it.
Obviously the bags have swollen with liquid in the meantime and to pull them through the narrow neck of my carboy would definitely squeeze out quite a bit of the liquid inside of the hops which other people have cautioned me about doing.
Honestly, I am thinking that any of the oils or concentrated liquid that is squeezed out would only be beneficial to the flavor profile that I’m going for, especially since I’m not too picky on this first one. I’m just going for massive hop flavor, I have a more balanced all grain brew designed for next time.
From what I understand of the dry hopping process, it shouldn’t add too much bitterness, so the only downsides is that I can see are reduced clarity, which also is not a big deal, and “hop burn” (which I am not sure exactly what that is, but I’ve heard a lot about). I’m also worried that it might impart too much of a vegetal taste, A mild grassiness wouldn’t be too bad but I don’t want it to taste like I’m biting into Broccoli, you know? Any thoughts or advice would be most appreciated.
I have my very first beer in secondary fermentation in a 5 gallon glass carboy currently, I plan to bottle in roughly five days. I started out with a chinook single hop Brew kit from Northern Brewer and spruced it up a bit with my own additions of hops (mosaic and chinook in the boil, dry hopped with galaxy, cascade, and mt.hood so far) and a slight boost of DME (1/2 lb) to hopefully raise ABV.
The idea is to pack as much hop flavor and aroma as possible into it while hopefully raising the projected abv from 5.5 to at least 6.0, hopefully higher. Most of my hop additions were pellets but I have 1oz of whole cone Cascade in muslin bags that have been sitting in there for about four days. I want to add one final infusion of simcoe that will sit until bottling and I’m thinking about pulling out the cascade in order to make room for it.
Obviously the bags have swollen with liquid in the meantime and to pull them through the narrow neck of my carboy would definitely squeeze out quite a bit of the liquid inside of the hops which other people have cautioned me about doing.
Honestly, I am thinking that any of the oils or concentrated liquid that is squeezed out would only be beneficial to the flavor profile that I’m going for, especially since I’m not too picky on this first one. I’m just going for massive hop flavor, I have a more balanced all grain brew designed for next time.
From what I understand of the dry hopping process, it shouldn’t add too much bitterness, so the only downsides is that I can see are reduced clarity, which also is not a big deal, and “hop burn” (which I am not sure exactly what that is, but I’ve heard a lot about). I’m also worried that it might impart too much of a vegetal taste, A mild grassiness wouldn’t be too bad but I don’t want it to taste like I’m biting into Broccoli, you know? Any thoughts or advice would be most appreciated.
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