Mission impossible - bottling NEIPA!

[Brewddah]

The consensus I have found on this forum, as well as others, is that NEIPAs cannot be bottled and maintain their hoppy goodness. They lose aroma, turn brown, etc. Nowadays, I keg almost everything I brew. I have this great recipe for an NEIPA that I think could do well in the specialty IPA category in an upcoming competition. I want to keg most of it, and prepare just a few bottles. I'm not ready to give up yet!

I have one of those Last Straw bottle fillers, but I really dislike it. It has always foamed too much for me, even at like 3 psi, and recently, has been doing a great job of infecting bottles. I think there are too many nooks and crannies in that thing. I have also used the "we no need no stinkin beer gun" set up, which works, but I have lost points for carbonation with that one in the past. The times I've won medals in competitions have been when I bottle condition. I also wonder if this would be beneficial for this case, since the yeast can kind of scrub for oxygen.

Here are my ideas:
1) Transfer all the beer to a keg, then push with CO2 into bottles that have priming sugar solution in them (there was an article on the front page of HBT about this).
2) Fill bottles quickly from the siphon before transferring to keg - maybe time matters?
3) For either of those cases, purge bottles with CO2 first?

Any other bright ideas anyone has to add?

 

[bigdawg86]

I bottled a NEIPA that I brewed for a friend... by the time he was able to pick them up, the beer had dropped pretty much crystal clear. The bittering hops were nice, but the aroma was not as robust.

I primed as usual, purged my bottles, filled using the lame plastic bottle filler, topped off bottles with C02 and capped. Same as everything else. I wonder if it would be possible to put a drop or two of hop resin in at time of bottle?

 

[Brewddah]

That is an interesting idea! I might consider using mosaic hop resin.

 

[Smellyglove]

If you've brewed this recipe several times and know your yeast, you probably will know where it will end up FG-wise, so maybe you could bottle before terminal gravity. Or just use a CPF with good technique. I personally dislike the taste of sugar carbed light beers, so I at least would try to avoid using sugar.

 

[MotoGP1000]

I'm brewing an NEIPA right now. So I referenced a recipe from Brew Magazine once and it was calling for bottling at something like 7days. So dry hopping after 4 days, then bottling 3days after that. Seemed ultra early to me but considering what im reading so far, makes sense. I wonder if that's the difference maker. I remember using the recipe and trying it out and my bottles after a month or so were still pretty darn good.

 

[Brewddah]

I failed rather miserably. I kegged it, purged the oxygen by lifting the relief valve a bunch of times, and then used CO2 to push the uncarbonated, beer into CO2 purged bottles that had corn sugar in them. It turned brown and tasted like wet cardboard. I've never tasted a beer so oxidized. I've bottled non-hoppy beers for competitions this way and this didn't happen at all. Obviously I didn't bother submitting these to the competition. NEIPAs have become so popular in my homebrew club, I'm thinking about proposing a NEIPA only competition where entrants drop off growlers that have been filled the same day as judging.

Or I save my money and splurge on one of those fancy, new, home canning setups...

 

[jmcquesten]

I'm in the process of testing a bottle filler that I built that aims to solve the problems of bottling beer from kegs. I have an ipa fermenting right now that I'll test to see how the hoppiness holds up. I'm trying to get some test runs done before I post it claiming it works wonders. So far, it's done what what it was designed to (bottle carbonated beer from the TAP, under pressure, WITH co2 purging).

I'm hoping it will help with ipas, but it's already outperformed the other bottle fillers I've used.

 

[Brewddah]

What if I fermented in a keg with a spunding valve set to a low-ish pressure (so as not to totally prevent ester formation), racked air-free to another keg, and then bottled from there? Before bottling, the only time the beer would see air is when I would dry hop. After that, only CO2. Maybe it's a way forward.