Dry Hopping Question

Yes, you can dry hop in your primary. Many people do that.

 

Yes you can dry hop at this point. A note that I learned this summer (at Home Brew Con): You may get more fermentation happening once you do this, but it is not from sugars in the hops. I would have to look it up more, but dry hoping actually shows to kick off more fermentation that may result is slightly dryer beer or more carbonated bottles if bottling occurs soon after on dry hops. How much happens, I can not say. I feel I have seen this but want to try doing small batch tests with this.

 

I think what you are referring to is "dry hop creep." A lot has been said about this on the various homebrew pods during he last year. It is my understanding that enzymes in hops cause the further breakdown of dextrins in the beer into simpler sugars that yeast will further ferment. This phenomenon caught my attention because of the possible development (and, hopefully, digestion) of additional diacetyl during this process.

 

Yep, works fine.

 

What type of stainless fermenter do u have?

 

My first thought would have been simply that the hops provide nucleation points for the small quantity of CO2 that's left in the beer after it's apparently calmed down. Or perhaps fermentation is not quite 100% complete. I guess I have some research to do on hop creep.

 

Do you have temp control? Do you keg? Have Co2?

 

No doubt dry hopping does create nucleation points that can cause CO2 to be released from the fermenter but that doesn’t seem consistent with granitebeard’s post. He alluded to drier beer and increased CO2 in the bottle, both of which sound like additional fermentation

 

for hop creep to occur...you need a lot of hops and you need amylo (iirc, the enzyme that is breaking down the dextrins) to be present in those hops. But amylo is only found in some hops from only some harvests from only some fields...but there seems to be zero consistency to why and when. That's my understanding anyway. I keg my beer so this is not of concern for me...but the latest I know is that there is still little known of the why and when amylo will be found in high enough concentrations in the hops to cause hop creep. But the phenom was described back in the 1800s.

But yes...dry hop in primary is all good in my book. I do find that racking off the yeast for dry hops does help though. I'll usually do two rounds, one in primary near the end of active fermentation and the second in a bag in keg.

 

Do you have a source on that? I’d like to learn more. Haven’t worked my way through the new hop book yet so maybe there? I did find a paper online about cascades having amylases. It seems to me it would be pretty common, maybe ubiquitous, for a rhizomatous plant to produce these enzymes.

 

There some research out there now that’s saying the increase in instances of hop creep over the last few years is due to the fact that brewers are asking the hop suppliers to kiln the hops at lower and lower temps to preserve as much of the delicate oils as possible. So now the enzymes that naturally occur in the hops aren’t being denatured.

Personally I rarely encounter hop creep or at least any negative side effects from in (namely diacetyl). I’ve even tried to force it to happen on beers that finished a touch higher than I wanted them to... no luck.

I tend to dry hop below 60* which also might be the reason why I rarely see additional fermentation and a gravity drop.

 

I can’t say with any certainty that I have encountered hop creep, but after dry hopping my Bigfoot-inspired barley wine last fall, I ended up with a diacetyl problem. At the same time I was hearing a lot of hop creep reports and I latched on to the idea. Of course, it could also be a more standard fermentation problem.

 

Stan Hieronymus had a chart of hops that coused hop creep in his HomebrewCon talk this year.

Amarillo was positive for it one year, negative for it the next.

 

I'm giving thumbs up to wasatchback's post cause I don't...just in what i'm reading from folks who are more "in tune" than I am...but his (wasatchback's) explanation makes a ton more sense to my "sensibility" than anything I've read so far...and why maybe wet hop beers heavy on the dry hops may be more sensitive than standard commercially available hops. Actually if you look at a recent thread about my homebrew "failure, " there were a couple wet hop beers that went awry. In that context, they kinda make sense...

 

The drying temp could play a role, I imagine. The brits reported this over a hundred years ago, and perhaps there were large scale tends in hop drying that prevented the issue from receiving attention in the intervening years, too.

 

cool, brewing is like that for a bit. to high to low abvs and lots of other things. still, it is a great hobbie and after a while, one can brew , pretty much, whatever they want.

keep brewin and have fun.