Dry hopping

[Alan Reginato]

Kkkk it's spontaneous emulsification. But it sounds a little too technical. Can I blame the Gboard? Kkkk

 

[Miraculix]

I was a fan of dry hopping in my beginnings, now I'm not sure any more if dry hopping really brings an added value to me as a homebrewer compared to the risks.

- Dry hopping will introduce enzymes into my beer, splitting up the longer sugar chains and making new sugar available to my yeast, causing a re-fermentation (also called hop creep). This has already resulted in foam exploding beers in my case, and also it will remove some of the body. Specially for the beers I have mashed in at a higher temp to keep more body... this will be ruined by dry hopping and make my beer
dry. I haven't really found a method against this problem yet...

- There is also the issue of hop burn which I have experienced in most of my dry-hopped beers, they taste like old black tea bags during two weeks after bottling or even longer. I've also had it when cold crashing the beer before adding the dry hops and lowering the dry hop quantities will not eliminate this risk completely and it's such an ugly taste.

I've seen on youtube channels that pretty good hoppy results are made with massive quantities of whirlpool hops at 70-80°C / 160-175°F as high as 200g / 0.5 pounds on a 5-gallon / 20l batch. I will try this next time without all the time consuming and risky dry hopping process...

Any experience with putting all your hops into whirlpool, leaving none for dry-hopping?

Yes, dry hopping brings a unique fresh flavour that cannot be accessed through whirlpool or late additions.

I go the other route, I skip all late additions, do only bittering and the rest is done via dry hopping. Best results for me so far.

Unless I want a beer specifically not to be dry hopped, then I might add a five minute addition. But only for very few beers.

All my American beers get the bittering and dry hop only routine.

 

[Jim R]

I think my next experiment with low oxidation dry hopping will be to dry hop in sanitized muslim bags tied off with small diameter fishing line suspended from the top of my fermenter. At the appropriate time I will simply crack open the fermenter slightly to lower the bag into the beer with the string and repressurize the fermenter with CO2 (purging it a couple times). This will allow me to repeat this to raise the bag out of the beer when called for by the recipe and use more than 1 dry hop addition if needed.

 

[iamninjabob]

I think my next experiment with low oxidation dry hopping will be to dry hop in sanitized muslim bags tied off with small diameter fishing line suspended from the top of my fermenter. At the appropriate time I will simply crack open the fermenter slightly to lower the bag into the beer with the string and repressurize the fermenter with CO2 (purging it a couple times). This will allow me to repeat this to raise the bag out of the beer when called for by the recipe and use more than 1 dry hop addition if needed.

I've seen some people use magnets to secure their hop bag to the top of the fermenter so they didn't have to open it up at all.

 

[Jim R]

I've seen some people use magnets to secure their hop bag to the top of the fermenter so they didn't have to open it up at all.

i have tried the magnet trick and it worked ok but it doesn’t allow one to remove the dry hops from the beer after an interval. It also is more complicated to add a second dry hopping addition without more magnets. I am hoping the fishing line method would solve these problems.

 

[Birrofilo]

i have tried the magnet trick and it worked ok but it doesn’t allow one to remove the dry hops from the beer after an interval. It also is more complicated to add a second dry hopping addition without more magnets. I am hoping the fishing line method would solve these problems.

Thinking about it, one might have a thin string tied to the hop bag, and getting out of the fermenter through the bubbler. The string is sanitized just as the hop bag.

When the moment of dry hopping comes, the hop bag is let fall into the beer (either with the string, or with the magnet trick),

When the moment of removal of the hop bag comes, just "fish it" with the string which is attached to it and raise it above the beer level.

The fermenter is never opened and one can decide both the soaking moment and the lifting moment.

 

[neale]

I recently rigged up a way of dropping a hop bag in and lifting out without opening the fermenter. It was a bit of a last minute thing, (my first NEIPA and I hadn't realised the potential for oxidation until I started reading forums like this). So I used a t-piece pushed into my bung, with string coming out the top and the side port of the t-piece going off to my blow off tube. I then pushed a bit of tube onto the t-piece with a tube clamp so I could lock the string in place until it was time to drop the bag in. I discovered I had CO2 leaking past the string/tube clamp arrangement so I used an ear plug to plug the tube. It looked a bit odd but it worked and it allowed me to lift the bag, drain a bit then drop it back in again.

I have what may be a better solution now though, although I haven't tested it.

I got some small bungs and I've drilled a string sized hole through one of them and fed the string through. I will then drill a small hole in the lid of my fermenter for the bung or maybe use the bung in the end of the t-piece. I am hoping that the bung/string will be gas tight enough. I intend on using a small clamp on the string above the bung until its ready to drop in.

The bungs I got are rubber but I think a silicone one would be better. It also occurred to me that with the large bung I have I could probably drill a small hole through it to one side and bypass the small bung / t-piece thing all together. I might get a spare bung before I try that though.