dry hopping advice?

One other thing you can do IF you want to dry hop in the secondary AND you would rather have the primary finish before you transfer is to add some sugar water to the secondary for a mini secondary fermentation while you dry hop. It works well for me.

 

Anyone else doing it this way? I've had it drilled into me that you have to leave the beer on yeast to 'clean up' after itself so the idea of racking to secondary prior to fermentation finishing scares me.

@Brew_Betty - how much sugar are you adding? Tablespoon per 5gal? I imagine it wouldn't take much.

I ferment in buckets with a spigot and plan to rack to purged keg with dry hop already in the vessel similar to the closed transfer system @telejunkie talked about in the BYO article. I can add the sugar water with the dry hop. After ~3 days, I'll rack to a second purged keg with an additional dry hop, and I'll serve from that. I anticipate losing a good amount of beer to the extra dry hop and limited to 5gal in the corny, but that's the sacrifice to the Beer Gods.

Anyone have a good trick to know when to stop racking to a closed keg? I usually have 5.5 - 5.75 gal in my fermentor anticipating losses to trub. I've overfilled a keg before and ended up with beer in my gas lines.

Cheers!

 

I don't use sugar water when I'm dry hopping in a keg. I use it for dry hopping in a secondary after primary fermentation is complete, then bottling. 1oz of sugar is what I use.

 

I'm going to use a keg for secondary. Then another keg to serve from. thx