Tired Hands (January 2017)

I suspect that most commercial brewers add the dry hops post fermentation but some commercial brewers do add some dry hops prior to fermentation being complete. Dave Green discussed this in his BYO article:

"In my discussions with pro brewers, two of the seven brewers add their dry hops while yeast was still active. On the one side of the coin, Josh Pfriem states that, ". . .the constant nucleation from fermentation scrubs away some of the hop aromas that you are trying to achieve." Matt Brynildson, on the other hand, adds his hops during fermentation, and the hardware garnered for his hop-forward beers should make any brewer re-think their approach. Matt has three reasons for his method: "This is to take advantage of the active yeast for (1) dissolved oxygen protection (2) natural mixing which we believe helps in better extraction of wanted oils and (3) biotransformation of hop oil compounds."

Cheers!

 

^^^For my homebrews, I add dryhops post fermentation and post cold crashing. However, there will be enough yeast in suspension for hop oils to grab onto. However, its very hard to avoid oxidation with my basic brew setup (still bottling).

 

Yeah dry hopping during active fermentation (muddy hopping?) is something that we have definitely been experimenting with after following some posts on the mad fermentationist. Before we would typically wait until fermentation was complete and then again once we kegged and held in suspension during serving.

 

Did I stumble into the homebrew forum? My bad, I was here to talk about Tired Hands...

 

Yeah this discussion was starting to get interesting, can we please go back to the regular routine of taking wild guesses at what IPA cans they'll release next week? I'm thinking it might be a milkshake!

 

Well in all fairness this was started with good intentions, mainly complaining about Tired Hands.

 

Guessing Punge.

 

There is a happy medium in there somewhere. I think denoting it for a style that is not traditionally dry hopped, or to differentiate it as a variation doesn't bother me.

Like I said about Other Half and Trillium, I'd have the same comment no matter the brewery. I think Stone has only used it for variations off existing beers, but it's still vague what exactly they mean by it - different hop varieties, more additions, more per addition?

Since this appears to be the first time Tired Hands released any beer called Double Birth, the term "double dry hopped" is meaningless without any point of reference. How can it be "double" if it's an original recipe?

It may happen to be a great beer, but that doesn't mean the description isn't superfluous which was my original point.

 

Sorry to interject some critical thinking into the lovefest.

 

Would that then also mean that a brewery has to first brew an IPA or a stout before it brews a DIPA or an Imperial stout?

 

The issue is that those style names are based on ABV - which is easily measured in the final product, and have established levels.

There is no "industry standard" naming convention for levels of dry hopping by pounds per barrel, number/length of additions, hop oil level, etc. It's more qualitative (vs. quantitative) based on the finished product's level of hop aroma.

 

Yeah I'm still going to come back to my original point with the mosaic powder thing. I am not saying that a different form of hops is what makes it a double dry hopped beer but simply that a second stage of dry hopping does? They probably didn't change any of their other ipa practices at all but the simple fact that it's something they wanted to showcase in the description makes sense to me. I don't know this all seems pretty straightforward? They dry hopped twice?

 

Do you think they have a "standard" IPA practice in terms of pounds per barrel, length, etc?

I haven't seen any published interviews with Jean Broillet where he goes into much detail about their brewing practices, nor have they released any homebrew recipes. Not necessarily a criticism, it seems to be common with most "newer" breweries nowadays to be more tight lipped.

 

I mean sure, out of any brewery Tired Hands seems like the one most likely to just throw things at the wall and see what sticks but I would think they have some kind of process down when it comes to beers like this for sure. Do I know this first hand? Nope. But at this point I know a Tired Hands ipa/dipa when I see one. I could see things like Alien Church, Technicolor, Oblivex, Double Birth, and others of this type having a close to standard process and just swapping out hops based on the recipe. All in all I kinda just treated this beer like one of the D2H3 series but with an unknown base if that makes sense?

 

And I also say this knowing that they have different abv's and the fact that they brew with different base malts per their descriptions.

 

OK, thanks. I understand your rationale better.

 

Correct, those guys were doing it…and right from the beginning as you point out. But I worked at a brewpub as assistant brewer around 2001 and we did several IPAs and PAs and only one of them got dry hopped, that was the fresh harvest IPA. That was a big deal back then, touting that it was dry hopped with a big release party. If you look at a lot of the older IPA recipes, dry hops were not always included in the recipe. Lagunitas IPA is a good example. There is a reason the ones that did get that treatment often stuck a lot longer or recipes got changed through the years to include dry hops…cause they were more aromatic.

 

A lot of times breweries that bill a beer as "double dry hopped" will explain on the can or bottle what specific process they used that qualifies it for that moniker, whether it's 2 stages, 2 hop varieties, double the usual amount, etc.

The IG post says "Double Birth is a Double Dry Hopped Double IPA brewed with wheat and oats. Hopped intensely with Simcoe and Equinox. We then double dry hopped this already sticky and pungent DIPA with an additional heap of Mosaic powder. Extremely dense, luscious, and sticky blueberry jammy. Also, check out that can!"

Now granted this is a little ambiguous, but it's safe to assume given normal brewing practices that Simcoe and Equinox made up a dry hopping, and then a second dry hopping with an additional heap of Mosaic powder was done, either simultaneously or at a different time. So you can expect that aroma in addition to the hops used to brew the beer.

So when a beer says, "double dry hopped," to me that indicates, "Hey they did something specific to this beer that they're calling out on the label, I should read the description and find out what they did." The label then is not superfluous at all unless a description of what they're referencing can't be found.

 

Except they're not. There is no standard to what constitutes a DIPA vs IPA or Imperial or whatever. I think that is a much bigger issue than the whole DDH thing - I couldn't care less about that.

 

Wait what? I thought this was addressed earlier in the thread that there are actual stylistic guidelines that differentiate between those things (which there are)? Dry hopping on the other hand can be interpreted in any number of ways depending on the brewery (as in they all add hops after the boil but who knows when and how much and for how long etc).