Dry Hopping In Primary: Timing

From what i heard Brewery's add hops near the end of fermentation to save time on dry hopping. You have to judge when FG is done and how long you want to dry hop.

 

I've heard leaving the hops in the beer for too long can impart a "grassy" flavor (not sure what that tastes like), so you'd want to account for that I guess. I usually dry hop for a week and then it's off to be packaged.

 

For the Averagely Perfect NE IPA recipe derived here, everyone collectively arrived at adding the first round of dry hops with 70% of fermentation complete. I don't take gravity readings during fermentation, so I figure just after high krausen would be fine. Keep in mind that that recipe also called for another round of hops after fermentation was 100% compete, for what that's worth.

If you're just looking for a general starting point or ballpark figure, though, I think 3 or 4 days is good enough.

 

Basically there is no clear consensus for a correct way to do it. You'll need to gauge timing based on your experience and on visual cues. Did fermentation start strong or was there a long lag time? Would you prefer to add dry hops closer to mid-fermentation or later fermentation?
I recently pitched my dry hops roughly 56 hours after yeast pitching and the yeast was ~75% complete. That beer started at 1.055, finished at 1.013 and at 56 hours, the SG was 1.024. With that beer, a krausen had developed within 12 hours of yeast pitching and the roiling fermentation had already slowed significantly by 56 hours post-pitch. Often times though, I'd wait until closer to completion of fermentation, more like 72hrs post-pitching. But that would be longer if there was a long lag time and fermentation seemed to proceed slowly.

 

Guys, i messed up. First time attempting dry-hopping and I added 2 oz of Galaxy in the primary immediately after pitching after I finished the cool down last night. What can I expect.. I was thinking of pulling the muslin bag when I get home today...

 

I want to see someone compare a beer that they dry hop during fermentation vs a beer that they dry hop after fermentation. Let the beer age for 3 or 4 weeks, like it should, and let me know if there's a difference in taste.

 

I have done this. My results were much lower aroma with the DH during ferment vs after ferment. The beer was good, but disappointing seeing I was looking for a big nose hit when I cracked the bottle.

Biggest nose has been when I DH after secondarying and adding a half oz of hop dust to the bottleing bucket. I know others would not like hop residue in their bottles, but that does not bother me!

 

There are breweries adding hops to the fermentation chamber before adding the wort. You'll be fine.

 

I'm not surprised by this. But the best reason for fermentation hopping IMO is to get some different aromas/flavors (via biotransformation) than you get with traditional dry hopping. You can do both in the same batch to get the advantages of both methods.

 

Hmmmm, I may try that next week. The one problem I have had is over bittering with lots of whirlpool and DH hopping. Perhaps cutting back on the bittering charge is in order.
thanks for the tip