Fermentation continuing after 10 days???

Regarding the high fermentation temperatures, you may end up with elevate esters and fusel alcohols. There are too many factors to say for sure. Hopefully the 76F you mentioned was the wort temp and not the ambient temp. If it was ambient, the wort would have got even hotter, although sitting on the basement floor may have mitigated that.

Anyway, how does it taste?

 

My advice is to just rip off the bandaid.

It's probably finished fermenting. It's probably off gassing CO2.

Well, the hops could provide nucleation points for off-gassing, but they probably didn't cause a slow fermentation (which I doubt you actually had).

 

I would think so.

 

There is no need to transfer to a secondary here and I would recommend that you don't conduct this step. Just add the dry hops to the primary and after your chosen dry hopping contact time is up package the beer.

Cheers!

 

Transferring from a primary to a secondary has a couple of issues:

• Introduction of 'extra' air (oxygen) which increases the oxidation aspect
• Potential increased risk of contamination/infection

The only time I conduct a transfer to a secondary is when I absolutely have to. For example when I secondary/lager my lager beers.

I personally just dry hop in my primary (a plastic bucket) and thereby mitigate exposure to 'extra' air (oxygen).

I am unfamiliar with what a Depth Charge hopper is. When I dry hop in my primary (bucket) I simply place the hop pellets within a sanitized muslin bag which is weighed down my sanitized glass marbles.

Cheers!

 

You did not say that you have been checking gravity. That is how I would assess whether it is still fermenting as opposed to off gassing. If your grav readings continue to decline, you are still fermenting. The most likely reason? I’d want more info but yeast health comes to mind. Consider yeast age, pitch size, whether a starter was involved, how you oxygenated, whether fermentation temps were appropriate. Lots of potential contributing factors.

 

Risking oxygenation when transferring.

 

YES. THAT IS THE FACTOR.

Hops are slightly fermentable. If you have a lot of hops in there, fermentation can continue slowly for a long time. Perfect example: I thought my last batch was stuck and I was ready to dry hop it and then package it up. Then I added the dry hops. Then I noticed a krausen had re-formed on top and it was fizzing and I was like OMG it's going again, which I was kind of happy about because FG prior to that was very high like 1.020. I had to wait 6.5 weeks from brew day to packaging day for it to quit fizzing and for the beer to go clear. FG=1.013. For those of you who keg, congratulations, you can just let it ferment the last bits in your keg. But I bottle. If I had bottled it up after just a week or two like normal, I would have had explosions.

Cheers.

 

Hops have enzymes that can break down some of the non-fermentables into fermentable sugars. Pro brewers have seen the gravity go up when dry hopping.

On the oxidation thing, with CO2 and a keg set up one can minimize it by doing closed transfers into a purged keg.

One runs the risk of infections and oxidation at every step. Try and minimize the steps, try and minimize the chances of infections and O2 when you do have to transfer.

 

Well . . . hops certainly have bound fermentables in the form of glycosides, but your yeast needs glucosidase enzyme activity to cleave the sugar from the aglycone. Most strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae don't have that activity, with the exception of diastaticus strains, and even then it is maltotriose specific, so it wouldn't cleave glycosides. Other than that, there's nothing that I've ever heard of that makes hops fermentable. If that was the case, I wouldn't be able to package my double dry hopped NEIPAs in under a week.

 

Did you even read what I wrote? There was a good talk covering this and other dry hop related items at HomebrwCon. They cited the studies behind this. Alagash and OSU, presented at CBC 2017.

And this.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2050-0416.1941.tb06070.x

 

Maybe 1% fermentable sugars by weight?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2050-0416.1953.tb06204.x
So if you use 1 lbs of hops, you are adding about 5 grams of sugar. Check my arithmetic but I don't think fermentation is the likely culprit. I think it is more likely that dry hops create CO2 nucleation points which can stimulate off-gassing.

 

Would certainly love to see that study, but my response was primarily to @dmtaylor. However, the study that you linked had some very important things to say in the summary, including this:

(1) The optimum conditions for the laboratory extraction of diastase from hop-cones have been determined. The process involves the use of peptone, as an agent for binding the hop tannin which, otherwise, would prevent the removal of the diastase. The peptone must be present in the medium from the commencement of the extraction. Brown and Morris in their experiments with hop diastase used hide-filings as tannin-binding agent, but we were unable to reproduce their results with this substance, and we recommend peptone as being much superior for this purpose.

and this:

(3) The observation of Brown and Morris that in hops considerable proportion of the saccharifying enzyme is located in the seeds has been confirmed, since we have demon strated the saccharifying activity of extracts of hop seeds, and we have also found in the cases of three seedless hops which we examined that the saccharifying activity was less than half that of normal seeded hops.

I think a very important aspect of that study is this:

The free sugars present in hops are largely extracted by boiling wort and thus contribute to the total of fermentable carbohydrates. Very little work on the nature of hop sugars has, however, been recorded, and indeed, no systematic study appears ever to have been carried out.

Which means that the other sugars that the study references are bound. An interesting study, yes, but, as you've said, dry hops are very unlikely to contribute additional sugar to a fermentation.