Good luck with it. The Irish post service has a really good one set up for the US, just expensive. Its an extra $20 to ship the hops from Jersey to Ireland. Then customs will have to get their cut too.
YVH is also associated with Haas. They sell all those products in the larger, brewery formats, but nothing in the homebrew size. They've said they are working on it, but it's been months to a year at this point.
I can't speak for most of us, but I have been only dry hopping (oxygen free) after a cold crash and found that to be enough to get the great aroma. Any oxygen sneaking in at any point will reduce the aroma in a few days in my experience. My last batch I knew I had gotten some some oxygen in due to me being out of CO2 and some hop clogging, but it was still drinkable.
How do you execute an oxygen free dry hop post fermentation? The best I can come up with is opening the keg while running gas from a tank in the hopes that only a little O2 gets in.
I have a Spike Flex+ now. I add hops to a 1.5" TC spool that I add hops to and the purge of oxygen (8 or 9 times) before dropping into the wort. With this setup I have 2 or 3 drops.
You can pre-load a dry hop keg. Put your dry hop charge in the keg, close it up, and then run the fermentation Co2 through it. Do a closed transfer onto the dry hops, then once you are done with your dry hopping process jump it to a purged serving keg. Simple.
This is what I do, never had an issue with oxidation.
Okay, I confess. My small CO2 ran out and I didn't feel like getting the big tank re-directed to transfer - alcohol may have been involved. So I pressurized my transfer when it slowed down to almost nothing, by mouth. Alcohol may have been involved and my first beer with the Flex+. Anyway I was initially disappointed that after 2 days the color and aroma had dropped. But then it stabilized, and often it was comparable in both aroma and color with decent canned NEIPAs I had purchased, but not the excellent that we're all going for.
Were 2021 available when you bought the 2oz bags or was it 2020?
Only 2020. Which I thought was odd but bought anyway.
they must of been able to source it from someone or found it t in a cooler lol. Either way, as long as it was stored well , 2020 was the crop year that turned people on to nectron, so it should be solid
You were quick off the mark there. Gone already. Glad you got some sourced in the end.
I've been doing Hops are Good method now for a while and I think it's an excellent process, probably the most O2 free environment I can hope for on a homebrew scale. I do have a slight concern that some aroma is been blown off from the fermentation as the smell in my fridge is incredible but maybe this is the trade off I need to just accept. I have toyed with just purging the empty keg during fermentation then when ready to dry hop I'd hook up the gas and run it while I open the keg to throw the hops in. I'll maybe try this on my next brew to see if I notice a difference.
I figured I would clutter up this thread with another...Thanks!...and "I brewed an NEIPA" post.
I think I have brewed 4 batches that I would label as NEIPAs. When I brewed the first one I did not understand the style so I incorporated too much of my American IPA experience. The second one was about 2 years ago and was quite nice. It was heavily influenced by Braufessor's recipe with lots of Citra and Mosaic. I brewed my third batch last month (picture at the end), and I brewed another one today.
I have been making my way through this thread. I am around early 2021 now. There are good ideas that I want to play around, but for today's batch I wanted to build on my prior batch, and fix some process errors. That last batch was 100% Centennial in the whirlpool (going heavy on the "survivables" concept) and Azacca and El Dorado in the dry hop. I had planned to soft crash then dry hop for 2 days, but for some reason I set my temp controller to 32F just after I added the dry hops and it did not occur to me until the next morning. I went ahead and just left the hops in for 4 days at 32F. Without a way to rouse the hops, I don't think I got the extraction I wanted. I also had planned to whirlpool at 180F, but the temp dropped to 172F before I got the hops in.
The last batch was good enough that I somehow drank it all in 16 days (just a 2.5 gal batch). It was just a little too sweet and the Azacca + El Dorado combo had too much of an overripe fruit vibe. I did not want to completely change the hops this time, so I just swapped in some Citra both in the Whirlpool and Dry Hops. Overall, I think the Centennial in the whirlpool worked well. I tweaked the grain bill to swap 1/4 lb of Honey Malt for 1/2 lb of Munich (also reduced the 2-Row by 1/4 lb).
Today's Recipe
• Batch Size: 2.60 gal
• OG: 1.068 SG
• SRM: 4.3
• IBU: 31.6
• Mash: 60 min @ 152F
• pH: 5.4
• Boil: 30 min
Grain Bill
• 69.3% - 4.75 lb - Rahr 2-Row
• 11.7% - 0.80 lb - Flaked Oats
• 11.7% - 0.80 lb - White Wheat Malt
• 7.3% - 0.50 lb - Munich Malt (6 SRM)
Hops Steep/Whirlpool 20 @ 180F
• 1.5 oz - Centennial
• 1.5 oz - Citra
Dry Hops
• 1 oz - Azacca
• 1 oz - El Dorado
• 1 oz - Citra
Yeast
• 1 pkg Lallemand Verdant
Water Profile
• Ca: 100 ppm
• Mg: 7 ppm
• Na: 25 ppm
• SO4: 67 ppm
• Cl: 137 ppm
Misc
• 1/2 Campden Tablet (Mash)
• 1.5 g Ascorbic Acid (Mash)
• 1 g Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 mins)
Pic of my prior batch (probably at around day 10 in the keg).
View attachment 760241
I personally wasn’t even worried about that but I would think it would have an impact on ph, but I’m not sure how much different it would be from mash adjustments. For example could you look in the calculator to see how much ph drop you’d get from adjusting your profile in the mash and then subtract that number from your ph in the kettle when you actually add your salts? I don’t know the answers to those questions but maybe someone here might
I just did a starter with Cosmic Punch that I'm using for my next batch. Omega's website says mash hopping with hops high in precursor thiol compounds may do something so I'm going to do that but I'm sticking with my usual dry hopping SOP, after fermentation and cold crash/transfer off the yeast.
If I were you I’d go
Sounds good man. If you pressure ferment, I’d just use a cheap dry yeast like us05 since pressure greatly minimizes ester production
