Dry Hopping

He used Cascade in there, was linking it all together.

I personally like Cascade better than Centennial for a dry hop, but thats probably because I have Cascade leaf, and I'm out of Centennial leaf.

 

I would think the simcoe would squash anything cascade would bring to the party, but I'm usually wrong about what to expect from anything brewing these days.

 

Just tosses more grapefuity rind line qualities I think.

Simcoe is more piney grapefruit to me. Two together work well, IMO. Much like Simcoe and Chinook together. Tons of pissy pine and grapefruit. More pine than grapefruit, but both together level it out.

 

Since you are bottle carbonating (adding 10-14 days onto your "grain to glass" time) I would want to accelerate the dry hopping schedule myself. I would add the dry hops once your airlock slows down to a crawl (usually day 3-5 for me). Just add a bit more than usual to compensate for hop oil loss due to heightened contact with both trub and yeast.

Beyond that, I like to add a second dry hopping (about 1/3 of the 1st dry hop amount) roughly 3-5 days later. Then I cold crash for 2 days, keg, and quick carbonated. Using the accelerated dry hopping schedule in combination with force carbonation allows me to go from grain to glass in about 17 days (for a double dry hopped ipa) which is awesome for aroma

To me, focusing on your "grain to glass time" when brewing hoppy beers is important if you want maximum aroma. I almost feel like my late kettle aroma additions are somewhat wasted if it takes me 4+ weeks to go from grain to glass. Maybe not at the beginning of the batch, but definitely by the time I'm drinking the last half of the keg

 

I personally have temp control. I can heat my carboy up or cool it down relatively quickly. I use a hydrometer frequently to determine the lowest point that I want my IPA to ferment to. If it's ideal then I begin the following process. I cold crash my IPA at 33 degrees F in order to stop any kind of fermentation that would carry the hop aroma from the dry hop away from the beer. Then in a day I heat it back up, or wait a day if you can't heat it up quickly. Drop some pellet hops in there. Wait four to five days. Cold crash again, raise the temp up again and then bottle or keg. The whole process for these beers to get them into bottles should be a maximum of 2 and a half weeks. This is the process that has worked best for me.

 

A secondary should only be for clarifying in my opinion. It won't change the taste for the better at all. If you want clarity then get a temp control system. I really don't see the necessity for double dry-hopping in professional brewing either. But of course everybody has different results and systems that work best for them.

 

I think several aspects of brewing may fall into this general trend. In some ways beer is picky, and you have to really pay attention to what you're doing i.e. sanitation of bottles, kegs, fermenter buckets etc, measuring out priming sugar, calibrating your thermometer, setting your Johnson controller, etc. In other areas, it's really kind of hard to screw up beer, i.e. to crystal or not to crystal?, missing gravity targets by a few points*, putting a late hops addition in a minute after the timer goes off, winding up with a slightly higher boiling volume because you over-sparged, forgetting whether your flameout addition was three ounces or four ounces, etc. Recipes seem to be pretty forgiving in general (within reason of course, a pound of roasted barley in your Belgian witbier ain't gonna fly).

During yesterday's brew session I realized I forgot to bring the packet of US-05 that I intended for the munich/citra-bomb beer. But before panic could set in, I check my bro's fridge. 1.5 packets of yeast, but only1/2 a packet of US-05, and a full pack of S-04. What could I do? Options were:

1. take a 45 minute round trip to go to the homebrew store, or go all the way back home (almost an hour round trip, without traffic). .
2. use a half pack of 05 and a half pack 04
3. use the whole pack of 04

I chose option 2, btw. To me 04 is "English" tasting, and everything that's brewed with that yeast has that certain particular flavor. It's not a bad flavor, just not something I want in every beer (but I do like it in English style beers). I didn't really want any 04 in this munich/citra smash, but so be it, not worth the drive, done.

Now I had a helper yesterday, and I was messing with some hose clamps when the late hops additions came due. I had the hops pre-bagged, and said "when the timer goes off, add the next bag. Try to keep it from boiling over by stirring or turning down the heat." It was funny because for the first bag, she was super-concerned about the exact procedure, the exact timing etc. When I noticed this, I chuckled to myself, and splain'd her that it's NOT a very sensitive procedure, and don't even worry at all over it. It's almost literally just "timer beep, me hops, ugh."

As for beer being forgiving... I'm sure my beer will come out fine, despite the yeast faux-paus, if not quite exactly what I originally planned. Most beers will probably come out fine too, as long as you used a reasonably sound procedure, and didn't go too far overboard on the recipe.

I have actually sorta accidentally experimented with dry hopping several ways. Mainly this is due to when I can brew. A few times I've have schedule restrictions that resulted in dry hops being in the primary anywhere from 3 days to two weeks (usually I do a week, except for the PtE thingie, which I followed the directions from RR and used a two-stage hops addition). I can't say that any particular dry hop method was clearly better, nor can I say that I noticed any off flavors or oxidation from any of them. Well, the PtE 2-stage method did yield more aroma, but of course it did, there were two four ounce additions of hops!

At any rate, cliff's notes for those who don't like to read my ramblings:

*I have missed a 1.060 target by ten points a couple of times (before I dialed beersmith in on my system), with no noticeable effects on the beers other than slightly lower alcohol

 

That process seems like an excellent way to ensure you get bottle bombs.

 

Not sure if anyone else caught this but 2oz in a one gallon batch is a LOT. Not only is it a high dry hopping rate you will loose some more of such a small batch due to the hops settling before bottling.

 

What exactly is dry hopping?

 

Sounds good. I wait until done (~ 7 days), then dry hop in primary (I love buckets). I usually dry hop in stages, a la Russian River.

 

I'm a skeptic as well, but Jamil Z recently said on a podcast he could pick out blind a double dry hop versus a single. Dude seems to have a good palette so it gives me some pause.

 

Dry hopping is a technique where hops are added to the beer either towards the end or after fermentation has finished. There are about a million ways to do it, and it seems they all work to one degree or another.

 

So you stop fermentation (temporarily) once you have reached the SG you want? Why? The yeast will get active again when you warm up the wort/beer.

 

Sounds like a terrible idea, actually.

Why do you stop fermentation prematurely? If you have a problem with over attenuation, then it's you not understanding your yeast as well as your grist/mash schedule.

You'll restart fermentation when you warm the FV again, and add the hops to dry hop.

Further more, you're then crashing it after room temp for 5 days with dry hop, and then raising it again?

The yeast will restart on you, so whatever work you took to stall it, was for nothing in the end, just alot of temp changes, and stopping/starting the yeast.

I hope you keg, because I'm willing to bet, you'll have bottle bombs with that method in the future, as well as a good chance of some yeast derived off flavors.