Dry hopping in Primary

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wterry

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I am thinking of dry hopping in my primary with pellet hops.

When is this normally done?
I assume it would be after fermentation is pretty much done and should be left alone for 5 days or so.

Will these pellet hops settle out on the bottom? I assume that they are just dumped straight into the beer, or should a hop bag be used.
A little concerned about when I bottle that the dissolved pellets may leave some particles in suspension.

Any thoughts on what has worked well?...I really do not want to rack to a secondary, so that is why I am looking in the primary.
 
Hop pellets will settle out eventually in most cases, but you'll still have a hard time completely avoiding hop matter when bottling if you don't use some sort of containment solution. A hop bag or stainless canister is ideal. Normally, you'd add the dry hops while there is still some active fermentation left, but while it's clearly slowing down. This preserves hop aroma from being blasted out of the fermenter by a vigorous ferm, and also allows the yeast to scrub out any oxygen introduced by the hop addition.
 
I usually wait until fermentation is complete to dry hop but now a days a lot of brewers dry hop just a couple days into fermentation. The New England style ipa changed the school of thought.
If you can cold crash before you package then that is the best way, imo. I used to bag all my dry hops but found the bag never let the hops really spread out and get all possible contact with the beer. So now I just dump them in and cold crash for 3 days or so before packaging. It drops out a lot of the hops as long as you're good at racking it over.
If you can't cold crash I'd get a big biab type bag to use for the hops.
 
There's been a bit of work done lately, too, on dry hopping cold. Check Scott Janish's book out for this concept. The jist is that dry hopping cold (40-50F ?) imparts great flavor in lesser time. Cold crashing to clear would still be beneficial, though.
 
I do dry hop on primary for 5 days when fermentation settles (usually after 3-4 days). Then I move to secondary and cold crash.
 
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