Dry hopping.

[Senza]

Hey.
I'm a beginner at brewing (on my second batch with extract beers). I have no idea, how to make the beer that best suits me, and what ingredients to choose, thus on the secont batch I am making the same beer from the same extracts with one having just dextrose and one is with beer enhancer. Now i think the fermentation is complete in the primarys (had the same reading for 48hours).

The kits were Golden ales.
Being experimental and wanting to see, what other ingredients do to the beer, I was wondering "Why not add hops".
Here's my question: Can I siphon the beer from the primary to the secondary, after a few days bottle it, while leaving half of the beer still in the botteling/secondary bucket and adding the hops pellets for a few days.

Thank you.

 

[RM-MN]

Two things.

1. You don't need to move the beer to secondary and there are some good reasons not to. Moving the beer exposes it to oxygen. You do not want your beer oxidized.
2. If you move half your beer to be bottled, the second half is exposed to even more oxygen and will possibly become infected by the bacteria in that air.

If you want to experiment with a 5 gallon batch, half of which will have hops added (dry hopping) split the batch into two fermenters. After a couple weeks or maybe a little less, add hops to one of these, opening the fermenter just barely enough to quickly add the hops so you minimize the amount of oxygen that gets in. After another 5 to 7 days, bottle both batches.

 

[Senza]

Thank you for the answer, I'll keep this batch the way it is and try the way you recommended on my next go.
Wish you all the best!

 

[ike8228]

What I do when experimenting is use several one gallon glass jugs/carboys. Carlo Rossi wine and some apple ciders comes in 1 gallon glass jugs and work great. May need a slightly smaller bung though. If the things you want to experiment with are on the cold side like hops or fruits or even yeasts and temps, cold crash vs gelatin etc, do your normal brew of X gallons then split it evenly (don’t leave too much head space) into multiple 1 gallons. You can try adding different hops to some and leaving one without hops, maybe add some lemon zest or orange juice to another (might go well with a golden ale) so on and so forth.

I tend to do this with newer recipes, but usually on the fermentation temperatures and cold crash and gelatin side of things. Some beers do better with cold crash vs gelatin or both or none.

I’ve done this often with fruit adds and yeast types for mead. Helps dial in good combos faster.