Dry hopping in corneys?

[ILOVEBEER]

Hi there,

I do AG, ferment in sankes and secondary is done in my corney kegs, from their they get force carbonated and to the kegerator they go for drinking.

I have never dry hopped but want to try an IPA coming up. Is it possible to dry hop with whole leaf hops in the corney? Will the hops clog the fluid pickup tube?


Thanks for your help.

 

[Scut_Monkey]

With whole hops you will obviously have a lot larger volume of hop material. I would recommend using a small hop/grain bag and fix it to the dip tube with a nylon zip tie or something similar.

I use stainless mesh balls (insert pervert comment here) that can be bought from home brew stores for ~$4 or from walmart for ~$1.50 in the kitchen aisle.
http://i15.ebayimg.com/05/i/000/ff/19/ecc9_1.JPG

 

[mbird]

Ilovebeer,
I dry hop in the keg all the time. What I do is:
1. force carb the beer
2. refridgerate in my kegerator
3. place hops in a weighted hop bag or large s.s. tea ball attached to a length of dental floss
4. drop hops into keg and tie the end of dental floss to ext. lid
5. replace lid on keg and re-seal with co2 pressure
Hop aroma/flavor will increase with exposure but I will normally leave the hops in the keg for a week before tasting. Once I have achieved the level of aroma/flavor that I like I will remove the hop bag.
mark
www.backyardbrewer.blogspot.com
www.thebackyardbrewer.com

 

[Doc Robinson]

Ilovebeer,
I dry hop in the keg all the time. What I do is:
1. force carb the beer
2. refridgerate in my kegerator
3. place hops in a weighted hop bag or large s.s. tea ball attached to a length of dental floss
4. drop hops into keg and tie the end of dental floss to ext. lid
5. replace lid on keg and re-seal with co2 pressure
Hop aroma/flavor will increase with exposure but I will normally leave the hops in the keg for a week before tasting. Once I have achieved the level of aroma/flavor that I like I will remove the hop bag.
mark
www.backyardbrewer.blogspot.com
www.thebackyardbrewer.com

I like this. I might give it a try.

 

[ILOVEBEER]

scut monkey...what a cool idea...to love mesh balls that is

mbird...thanks for the advice!

 

[Scut_Monkey]

scut monkey...what a cool idea...to love mesh balls that is

mbird...thanks for the advice!

The Furry picture above makes this comment even better!

 

[ILOVEBEER]

HAHA yep! Thanks again for the help and advice

 

[Scut_Monkey]

No prob. MrBird has a pretty good system that I wouldn't mind trying myself. I would give it a shot.

 

[lehr]

I dry hop in the keg in a mesh bag and I leave them in until the keg is empty.

Pat

 

[calpyro]

Hi there,

I do AG, ferment in sankes and secondary is done in my corney kegs, from their they get force carbonated and to the kegerator they go for drinking.

I have never dry hopped but want to try an IPA coming up. Is it possible to dry hop with whole leaf hops in the corney? Will the hops clog the fluid pickup tube?


Thanks for your help.

My procedure is identical to yours. I ferment in Sankey kegs also, secondary in Corney kegs (setup for dry-hopping) and rack to another keg for the “bright tank”. I have been doing it this way for a few years and have perfected a method for extracting a very good dry-hop flavor.
Here it is:
*Ferment in the keg as you have been.
*Rack to the Corney Keg fitted with a Surescreen: http://www.northernbrewer.com/default/surescreen.html, which has your dry-hop addition and has been thoroughly purged with C02. In my experience, hops that are floating free in the Corney Keg have much better contact with the beer than if they are contained within a bag. I have used both methods and found that I can get more dry-hop flavor from hops with a Surescreen, than can be extracted from a bag.
*After a few weeks, I crash chill, rack to a clean keg, add gelatin to drop the tannins and suspended hop matter and carbonate.

Note: the Surescreen does not work well with pellet hops they clog the screen. I also coarsely chop my whole hops, in a food processor to break the cones up a bit and further improve the contact between the luplin glands in the hops and my beer. Works really good for me.

 

[kmat123]

Ilovebeer,
I dry hop in the keg all the time. What I do is:
1. force carb the beer
2. refridgerate in my kegerator
3. place hops in a weighted hop bag or large s.s. tea ball attached to a length of dental floss
4. drop hops into keg and tie the end of dental floss to ext. lid
5. replace lid on keg and re-seal with co2 pressure
Hop aroma/flavor will increase with exposure but I will normally leave the hops in the keg for a week before tasting. Once I have achieved the level of aroma/flavor that I like I will remove the hop bag.
mark
www.backyardbrewer.blogspot.com
www.thebackyardbrewer.com

I'm just getting into kegging, but if you remove the lid of the keg won't you have to re-carb before serving, or at this point is all the CO2 dissolved into the beer?

 

[Scut_Monkey]

I'm just getting into kegging, but if you remove the lid of the keg won't you have to re-carb before serving, or at this point is all the CO2 dissolved into the beer?

When you remove the lid the CO2 in the head space of the keg will need replaced but the CO2 that has dissolved in the liquid (vast majority) will stay. So opening the keg means you have only lost a little bit of CO2 which is replaced within seconds of turning the regulator back on.

 

[Scut_Monkey]

My procedure is identical to yours. I ferment in Sankey kegs also, secondary in Corney kegs (setup for dry-hopping) and rack to another keg for the “bright tank”. I have been doing it this way for a few years and have perfected a method for extracting a very good dry-hop flavor.
Here it is:
*Ferment in the keg as you have been.
*Rack to the Corney Keg fitted with a Surescreen: http://www.northernbrewer.com/default/surescreen.html, which has your dry-hop addition and has been thoroughly purged with C02. In my experience, hops that are floating free in the Corney Keg have much better contact with the beer than if they are contained within a bag. I have used both methods and found that I can get more dry-hop flavor from hops with a Surescreen, than can be extracted from a bag.
*After a few weeks, I crash chill, rack to a clean keg, add gelatin to drop the tannins and suspended hop matter and carbonate.

Note: the Surescreen does not work well with pellet hops they clog the screen. I also coarsely chop my whole hops, in a food processor to break the cones up a bit and further improve the contact between the luplin glands in the hops and my beer. Works really good for me.

This sounds like a good idea as well. However, I have never used whole hops and don't really plan on it. I think with pellets the difference between dry hopping in a bag and free in the keg might be less. My thought is because you could use the same size bag but the hops will be taking up far less space in the bag and therefore more contact with the beer. Just a guess though.

 

[boredatwork]

Use a bag.

That's my lesson learned. I used pellets and I just threw them into a conditioning keg without a bag. Basically the sludge blocked the dip tube and I had to siphon the beer out instead of using CO2 pressure.