Dry Hopping Issue-Is this normal?

[sfrice80]

I'm assuming this is normal. Alright, so I've never dry hopped before. Since I plan on kegging my Tripel IPA on Thursday, thats TripEL not TripLE, I figured I would dry hop it this evening and keg it Thursday. So, I added 2 oz of Centennial into my secondary fermentor. Within a minute, the bubbling went from nothing to every second. Now, it keeps blowing over. Its been about 2 hours now and its still going crazy. Is this normal?

 

[HodgsonsBrewer]

I think it's just letting off exess Co2 it should chill out pretty soon. The bonus is that will help drive off any O2 that is in your secondary.

 

[alcibiades]

yeah, not sure what the science is behind it, but its normal.

 

[Captain Damage]

I've had beers start fermenting again after racking to secondary a couple of times. And yes, it's real fermentation, not just off-gassing. Came down an extra gravity point (-0.001). Could be the agitation/stirring things up during transfer, could be the introduction of a little oxygen... For whatever reason, it happens sometimes. So my rule now is to wait a couple of days after racking to see it it's started up again before throwing in the dry hops.

 

[sfrice80]

I had it in the secondary for over 2 weeks. There was no active fermentation going on. I then added the hops on top of it and it went nuts. It unexpectedly blew over. I'm trying to figure out why the addition of hops would create such a reaction. No fermentables were added.

 

[smizak]

You ever see the Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke reaction?

Same principle. You're giving the CO2 in solution a bunch of nucleation sites with the hops.

Did you use pellets? I had an APA almost foam over after dumping 2 oz. of pellets in, they were real broke down and powdery.

 

[sfrice80]

Thats exactly what I told my girlfriend last night. The only thing I could think of was similar to the coke and mentos experiment. Yes, they were pellets so when they broke apart it probably was like adding some mentos to a slightly carbonated solution.