Dry hopping with a grain sock?

[StophJS]

I'm currently brewing up Yooper's Lakefront IPA clone(ish) and will be dry hopping in a couple days. I've only dry hopped once previously, and found that the hop matter did not sink even after 10 days, and it made racking quite a nightmare.

This time, I plan on throwing the pellets in a sanitized grain sock, and basically running the end of it through the airlock whole and lodging it there with the airlock itself. My thinking is that this will make it easy to simply pull up the bag on bottling day and remove most of the hop matter.

Does anyone have any experience with this technique, or a similar one? Any suggestions on how I might improve it? Thanks.

 

[jaydog2314]

the first time i dry hopped I used a muslin bag, it wasn't too bad. I did weigh it down so it sank and stayed at the bottom, kind of a pain to get out though. Since then I just dump the pellets in free and I haven't had any not sink. Seems odd after 10 days for it not to sink. If you lodge it against the airlock it def will be easy to get back out. Just make sure to have enough slack so that if/when the hops begin to sink you aren't keeping them above your beer.

 

[bobmcstuff]

I used a bag first time, haven't bothered since though.

I find with whole leaf hops they never sink, so may as well let them swim free... Free range hops!

You can add a few sterilised glass marbles to the bag to help it sink, but if you're using a lot of hops it doesn't really help all that much.

I've never used pellet hops though, maybe they sink much easier.