hop when to add?

[Sagatho]

hello fellas

this weekend will be a brewend XD

i still making experiments with new recipes this time i want to add hops in my dry sparkling recipe, but the last time i have a bad experience i use cascade hop that end in a grass flavor i add the hops in primary, now have 1oz of Chinook hops for this weekend, but when is the perfect time to add the hops in primary or secondary fermentation? o do i have to boil some honey with the hops?

anyone can share some tips?

:rockin:

 

[didinho]

do you want to give bitterness or aroma to the mead?
do you boil it?

 

[TandemTails]

I dry hopped a hydromel of mine for about a week in secondary before bottling. It was 1 oz for 5 gallons and I can notice some slight spiciness from the hops.

I would recommend putting the hops in a hop sack since it was a real mess trying to leave them behind when racking to the bottling bucket.

 

[ACbrewer]

I was listening to a bradsmith pod cast on hops. It is a few years old. the guest worked out in hop growing region of Washington state. I forget if he was a university guy, and FDA guy or what, but he focused on growing hops.
Anyhow, Hops can give 4 flavors to a beer (and well any beverage) based on the variety and the temps. The flavor molecules are temperature sensitive, and can be driven out by heat.
The four flavors are grassy, citrus, piney and bitter. I remember grassy is very low in temp, and if you make a tea of the hops and have it above say 70 or 80 deg F it will drive off most of that grassy flavor. I don't remember if citrus or piney was next. I remember that bitter was last, and highest temp. So if you boil the hops for any amount of time, you will drive out the other three and leave yourself with just bitter. Obviously variety of hops matters, as some have more bitter, or more pine or more citrus. But the basics of driving out the flavor based on temp still applies.

Which getting to your question depends on what flavor you are after. Is it bitter? Then look for a bittering hops, and look to make a tea with it. I'd use about 1 to 2 cups per gallon - regardless of the amount of hops - which you probably also have as a per gallon. If it is one of the other flavors, make a tea but use say 150F water, not 212. Don't keep a boil. In fact for bittering, boiling may be a good idea and longer the boil the better. In beer making they recommend some - but not all - of the malt for getting better hop utilization. If you can use some of your honey in the boil. I personally don't boil my honey when making mead any more, so I'd sacrifice some of the honey for the boil, but not all. The honey aromas are also lower temp and come off because of that.

lastly I note that this is a sparkling mead - that is good. The reason beer drinkers have to drink it, rather than rinse their mouths like wine drinkers is so the bubbles in the beer can pop on swallowing bringing the aromas into the nasal passages where we can taste them. Oh yeah +1 or more for the hop sack no matter what you do.

 

[bernardsmith]

If you are dry hopping then about one week to 10 days is about the maximum amount of time to allow the hops to stand in the mead without extracting grassy flavors. Remember that ethanol extracts flavors and you are in fact steeping your hops in ethanol, not water (wort). That implies - and it does - that you dry hop just before bottling and so you add the hops to the secondary. That said, I frequently make a hopped mead and I boil my hops for about 10 - 15 minutes in water to extract maximum flavor and then use that water to dilute the honey (about 60 minutes boil time maximizes the acidity (bitterness), adding hops to your mead when the mead is at room temperature will maximize the aromatic quality of the hops, but if you are using a good quality varietal honey that honey will possess aromas and those aromas may be masked by dry hopping.