Second fermentation hops

[nickatina7]

Hey guys I just brewed a malt extract kit of Rogue I2PA yesterday. Brew day went great! Only my second and i felt it went a lot smoother this time. I only got a gravity of 1.070 but I think that's because I used a little too much water (6 gallons) and it had 12 lbs of extract. But it is already churning and fermenting like crazy one day later.


Anyways my question is the directions say to add the Amarillo hops to the secondary fermenter for 3-7 days. I have a 5 gal secondary fermenter but the guy at the brew shop told me to forget secondary fermenting it and just keep it in the primary for around 3 weeks. But I was just wondering how to add the hops. Do I just add them straight to the fermenter? Or do I put them in a grain bag and put them in?

Thanks,
Nick

 

[jmcm_brew]

If you add them right in they'll float and they likely won't get fully saturated and the aroma won't be as prevalent because of that...I like to put them in a sanitized grain or hop bag with about 20 sanitized small marbles.. Seems to weigh the hops down enough to fully submerge whether using pellet or whole leaf... Good luck!

 

[narl79]

You do not need to do a secondary. Lots of people are shying away ftom it and personally I'm one of them. I usually wait for the fermentation to slow down and let the krosen fall down and then add my dry hop addition. You can put them in right as soon you put in the fermenter but I've had them clog blow off tubes and airlocks so I wait a couple days. Try diff things and experiment that's the fun. Cheers

 

[narl79]

Oh and use a bag lol you don't want to siphon up hops when it comes time to bottle

 

[nickatina7]

Thanks for the help. I think I might throw them in in a week or so when there's not much of a risk of it clogging the air lock. I love extremely hoppy gnarly IPA's. I don't know how much these hops affects the flavor but I will experiment. Also we were pretty buzzed when we brewed and we have an insane amount of honey that Crispin was going to get rid of so I put some in with the malt. I don't know if that was a bad or good idea but I will never know unless I try I guess. Haha.

 

[GASoline71]

Dry hopping does pretty much nothing for flavor, and is all for aroma.

If they are whole hops... just dump them right in the primary without a bag. If they are pellets, put them in a small sanitized muslin bag and drop that in. You will lose about a 1/4 gallon of beer to whole hops as they suck up some of the beer as they float on top.

When time to rack to the keg or into your bottling bucket, you can rack the beer right from under the layer of whole hops on top. If you have the pellets in a bag, they stay there, keeping them out of your racking cane/auto-siphon.

As far as the adding the honey... one thing about this hobby is... you can do what ever you want and it will still probably make pretty darn good beer. Even some of the mistakes you make will still turn out to be a great beer.

Gary