Dry Hopping - Sealed (serving) Keg - O2 free?

[renstyle]

So I'm pondering the efficacy of dry hopping in a serving keg, O2 free.

Would it work to:

1. clean and sanitize a serving keg

2. add dry hops to one of the mesh tubes, suspend in the serving keg (weighted with marbles to prevent floating)

3. add 1-2 gal of sanitizer to this keg (so the hops are hanging above the fluid)

4. harvest fermentation CO2 by using the serving keg as the airlock until a sufficient quantity of CO2 is produced such that the serving keg holds only CO2 gas and the dry hop addition.

- this would push the 1-2 gal of sanitizer (more or less) completely to another vessel...
- previous threads have illustrated that a single 5 gal batch of beer produces in excess of 300-350L CO2, which should purge the serving keg enough to provide an extremely low O2 concentration.

This would give you a purged keg that already has the dry hop addition inside. Just transfer from primary in a closed setup and good to go?

My thought would be use floating dip tubes or similar in the serving keg to prevent DH material from clogging?

Has anybody tried something similar?

 

[McKnuckle]

I have a Mosaic/Simcoe pale ale on tap now produced by this method. I left the hop canister on the bottom to remain for the duration, but you could hang yours if that bothers you.

You don't need to muck around with sanitizer if you are purging the serving keg with fermentation gas. There's enough CO2 produced that will evacuate the keg more or less completely. Sanitize the keg, dump it all out, and put a filled hop canister in the keg before you start. I would use a floating dip tube. When I did this exact same thing with a standard dip tube, it clogged instantly on the first pour - despite hops being "contained" in the canister.

 

[renstyle]

Good point on the lack of StarSan! Glad to hear I'm not totally wacko.