Northeast Pales/IPA/DIPA

I did a 6 oz dry hop in my carboy for my NE IPA last night and planning to do a 2 oz keg hop. I was curious if you typically cold crash your primary fermentor before transferring for your keg hop? I've done that in the past but was curious about your process. thanks for all of your input on this thread!

 

Couldn't agree more. I typically dry hop twice, once near the end of fermentation and again in the keg. The late fermentation dry hop provides a softer, less raw hop aroma and hopefully the oxygen scrubbing yeast help keep the O2 at bay. I feel like that provides a nice balance between flavors. If I'm really going crazy I will do three dry hops, one at the tail end of fermentation, one in a warm keg and a final one in a cold keg and each brings something a little different to the party.

 

I don't, more out of ease than anything else. I don't like cold crashing with an airlock (risk of suck-back), and I'm too lazy to do keg-to-keg transfers. I don't really mind if a bit of sediment falls out during the first week in the keg.

 

When you dry hop in primary near the tail end of fermentation, you could bung up the carboy so those last few points create a little pressure. I've read about several places doing this; trillium, Russian River, Wicked Weed, etc. But as a homebrewer, you get the added benefit of then cold crashing primary with little risk of suck-back because the pressure would just be equalizing. Just a thought.

 

Your muddled opinion is worthless since I specifically referred to flavors, which you somehow interpreted to go on to say "CO2 scrubs FLAVORS", then further "you are just wasting money because it wont add AROMA"!?
Maybe read and comprehend a post before you comment on it.

Yeast interactions with hops DURING primary fermentation, a very understudied area with IMO a lot of promise. I am not concerned with aromas from the dry hops at this point. Maybe you should have not commented and tried a split batch yourself before commenting, I already have. I also wasn't asking for an opinion just dropping knowledge that I've learned over my many years brewing, but that fell on deaf ears on your part. Give it a shot, you might discover something new that isn't yet in a book you can buy on the shelf.

 

Man relax its homebrewing. 1- After I realized how convoluted my response was I replied again to clear up my stance. 2- I said it was just an opinion and to give it a shot. We are all here to learn, no one is perfect or knows everything there is to know about homebrewing.
I was just giving my opinion of what happens to hops during primary fermentation.

@OldSock That is interesting information. I will definitely do some more research on this subject. Do you know of which yeast strains help this process and which don't?

 

Hey man, I guess I thought I was somewhere that had a higher level of discourse and knowledge, but I guess there is only one homebrewing forum on this site and I really should stick to the other outlets for that. I'm certainly all about learning, and am a perpetual student of brewing myself, but I'm also about sharing techniques and tricks that you may or may have not heard of before. I myself only learned about this a few years ago by someone at the Nat'l Homebrew Conference, which I took home and tried for myself, I believe it was also touched on in the audacity of hops book as an area worth exploring. It's an area I'm very curious about, and I don't think it deserves to be thrown aside by "opinion" that every homebrewer that's ever read a homebrewing book already knows. Let's figure out what we don't know. Try it out with mosaic hops in a side by side and see if you taste a difference or not.

 

Stan Hieronymus has talked at several NHCs about bio transformations from the yeast. Not sure I have heard about adding hops at beginning of the fermentation, but it is something I might try. Do you add when you pitch the yeast or once the yeast are out of the growth phase?

 

The hops are added during the beginning of the growth phase. Typically I will add this particular dry hop as soon as I start seeing airlock activity, so right after the lag phase.

Found this review of bio transformations that may be of interest for some readers as well: http://www.researchgate.net/profile...rmentation/links/0c96052d298ccae711000000.pdf

 

Jeff,

FWIW, I have no recollection of Stan discussing adding dry hops ‘early’ in his book For the Love of Hops.

During his presentation at the 2013 NHC he did make mention of:

“At Kirin: Dip Hopping. Hops added to fermentation tank. Dip hopped beer high in linalool and low in myrcene compared to dry hopped beer. “We assume that high linalool was due to low temperature extraction, and low myrcene was due to elimination by yeast.”

I have no recollection on what he verbally stated when he presented this information.

Are you aware of any commercial breweries who add dry hops ‘early’?

Cheers!

 

Non early that I recall. Hadn't heard this before, but I didn't know about whirlpool hops until 2009.

i will add it to the list of things to try.

 

Aroma and flavor are intertwined. Plug your nose and drink a beer, then repeat with nose unplugged. Or drink a beer with a cold.

I'm going to give this a try on my next IPA, since I just had my hop harvest, I have plenty. It would be interesting to experiment on adding dry hops near fermentation slow down, maybe get the best of both worlds.

 

I usually do it 72 hours after pitching, likely too much sugar remaining to safely/reliably hard bung. A .001 drop creates .5 volumes of CO2, so that can quickly get out of hand! Breweries usually have spunding valves that let off any pressure in excess of a target.

That's the big hurdle at the moment, also knowledge of which hops particularly benefit. Anecdotally I'd bet 007, 1318, Conan, 3711 and a few others are likely more active than others... but no hard evidence. Hopefully White Lab's big genetic push will get us more strain-specific info. Brett tends to be more likely than Sacch to produce beta-glucosidase (if it can ferment lactose, that is a good indicator it can free aglycones)

 

How early?

Matt from Firestone Walker was the first brewer I remember suggesting adding hops while fermentation was winding up. JC from Trillium has been a big advocate for the technique more recently. I'm not aware of anyone who adds dry hops before fermentation peaks.

 

Here is a select item from the link I posted that hints at an increase of linalool (which seems to be one of the highest concentration of volatiles in blueberries) from this process.

Another link of interest: http://www.cerevisia.eu/pdf/2007/2007_vol32_num1_art1.pdf

more:
https://beersensoryscience.wordpress.com/tag/glycosides/

 

Another "known" that is not quite contributing to the discussion, but your results will if you end up trying it. I think that a combination of all of the mentioned methods could yield some very interesting depth of flavor from the hops, just as we all have tried the various kettle additions and other ways of using our favorite flowers in the process.

 

Early like you are doing in your current batch; add hops before (or around the same time) as pitching yeast.

Cheers!

 

I just made it up, not aware of anyone trying it (although I didn't look hard at all). DFH should do it for 60 Minute, continuous dry hopping throughout fermentation?

I'm also playing with the idea of aging a dark beer and then adding a fresh cold-extract of dark malts right before serving. There are so many ways to play with the four standard ingredients, as homebrewers I'd like to see more of us pushing the process envelope!

 

Are any of y'all planning on reusing your yeast? If so, how do you keep all that hop debris out of it? This might actually be a bigger question for the pros interacting with this thread as well.