Dry hopping with limited equipment

[JayEff]

I have a beer sitting in the fermenter for 4 days so far, and I'm strongly considering to dry hop with a bit of simcoe and a bunch of mandarina bavaria, I'm thinking something like 1:3 or 1:2 ratio, to really make that orange shine.

However, I forgot to order a hop bag. I know this is not too big a deal, since many people do without, but I'm not entirely sure on the process involved to keep the hops out of the bottles. I also would like to skip a secondary for fear of oxidization (My only vessels are buckets with around 5 liters of head space to the 12 liters of beer).

I have two options now: Either I dry hop without a container for the hops. In this case, I'd have to filter when racking to the bottling bucket. How would I go about that? I heard that you can wrap some filter material around the racking cane, but I was unclear on whether the material should go to the inlet of the cane, or the outlet of the tube.

Another option is this little contraption here: <see attachment>. The cloth is a tea sock (which I would also use for the racking cane as described above), the metal mesh cup is a tea strainer as well. The scale is in centimeters, so it's around 6 and a half inches in length. It's rather small for a hop container I think, and the mesh might be too coarse anyways.

What do you think of my options? How much hops would you use for a 12 liter (roughly 3 gallon) batch, if my goal is not exactly to blast your nostrils with hops but achieve a noticeable aroma? I was thinking of around 40 grams total, that's about 1.5 oz. Does that sound reasonable?

(Perhaps I should mention that I used 10g of simcoe and 30g of mb at whirlpool too)

 

[flars]

I dry hop in the primary after final gravity is reached. No bag for the hop pellets. Dry hop duration is 7 days most of the time. When it comes time to rack to the bottling bucket almost all of the hop debris has settled. I use a catch bag on the auto siphon just in case some hop debris is picked up racking to the bottling bucket.

Second picture is how much hop debris that could have made it into the bottling bucket.

 

[stz]

I've stopped using leaf hop for dry hopping and now use pellets only. When I did use leaf hop I used it loose and as long as it was fully hydrated it used to drop out given time. I've a racking cane which has an inverted |_II_| kind of affair on the base which would make it difficult for anything but the smallest pieces to pass through. I would rack to a bottling bucket and while I can't say I never got ANY hops come through the leaf would bunch up and form a little filter near the end of the cane. The odd small leaf that came through generally used to remain at the bottom or stuck to the side of the bottling bucket. I wouldn't put anything on the outlet unless you are sure it isn't going to aerate and cause any co2 in the beer to fob on transfer. I dry hop straight into primary after hydrating pellets in a little boiled water allowed to cool slightly (basically put the electric kettle on and come back half an hour later). If you leave them for too long in the water they will soak it up and you'll have to try and get a solid mass into the beer, I aim for a thick slurry which is maybe 1:10. This drops out fine when cold crashing, but I imagine given enough time it'd settle out as well without cold crashing. I didn't used to hydrate, but sometimes used to find whole unbroken pellets at the bottom of the fermenter, especially with high alpha varieties.

 

[stz]

Oh and on the amount personal taste and opinions abound as always, but when trialling a hop variety I stick to 2-2.5g per litre.

 

[JayEff]

I dry hop in the primary after final gravity is reached. No bag for the hop pellets. Dry hop duration is 7 days most of the time. When it comes time to rack to the bottling bucket almost all of the hop debris has settled. I use a catch bag on the auto siphon just in case some hop debris is picked up racking to the bottling bucket.

Second picture is how much hop debris that could have made it into the bottling bucket.

Thank you for the pictures, they were very informative - the second one specifically was going the extra mile Sure puts my mind at ease that the hops settle just fine in 7 days. I don't see myself reusing the notty yeast cake considering dry yeast is so cheap, so I think I'll go with your method here.

I should've mentioned I use pellet hops, and furthermore that I don't have the facilities to cold crash.

Oh and on the amount personal taste and opinions abound as always, but when trialling a hop variety I stick to 2-2.5g per litre.

Thank you for the input as well! I will go with the catch bag as flars described but I'll be as careful as can be to avoid oxidization. In accordance to your advice I think I will go with 30g total of hops, which is right in the middle of your 2-2.5g per liter. I like the smell of simcoe, perhaps I'll make it easy on myself and go with 10g simcoe, 20g mb. Then again, I did name the beer "Orange Tiger"

Thank you for sharing your experience with not hydrating hop pellets, I had never heard of this technique before. I think I will forego hydrating the hops this time, because I want to drop them in through the tiny airlock hole. Pouring a slurry in might be harder without a funnel. If I do find any dry pellets as you described, I'll know what to do to avoid it in the future, but for this, my second ever batch, I want to keep everything as simple as I can.

Edit: reviewing your post regarding grams of hops per liter, I think I understand it better now: When trialing a hop variety, you use this much. The way I understand this is, you want the hops to stand out and be noticeable, so you can decide if you like it or not. Perhaps I should go for 30g of MB after all, then, since I want the orange aroma and flavor to be really noticeable, the simcoe is mostly for giving the beer a more well rounded character as I've heard MB is a bit one-dimensional. I think I'll go for this ratio then. I plan on brewing this recipe multiple times and refining it further, it's my first and I think I'll be able to learn a lot from it! (Gonna be pretty expensive though, with the excessive use of hops )