Such thing as dry hopping overkill?

@inchrisin wow, never saw that before. Bet that could turn yer beer green,lol.

 

That thing is amazing!

 

This is a very subjective topic. I tend to like 3-6oz of dry hops for beers that get 50-80ibu in the kettle. My most common dose is 3-4oz. There are some hops that would be very unpleasant to me in that range.

More isn't always better. A bigger dry hop is more likely to produce undesirable aromas such as onion, garlic, cat piss, under boob sweat, etc. A different person might not pick up questionable aromas from the same beer and might only smell "amazing" tropical fruit and dank notes. Using less of the same hops would likely produce the same result for me.

Everyone has a limit. All you have to do is test the limit to determine your threshold of overkill. Start with 1# dry hops per gallon and work backwards.

 

Yes....

But my experience is nothing to do with aroma.

Many new wave hops have a greater percentage of oils than traditional varieties. Some people will do a massive hop stand on IPA and then dry hop the crap out of it and the hop oil actually lends a resinous (oily mouth feel that may seem sweet) to the finished beer. I notice this a lot when people use Citra, Mosaic, Simcoe and a few others.

Solution? Use a better bittering charge and/or fewer dry hops. My other theory that I have yet to try is to dry hop with leaf instead of pellets.

Recently, I took a can of Booming Rollers to a homebrew meeting and compared it with a homebrewed beer that was dry hopped with Citra. When tasted side by side, its very apparent. Both finished at the same gravity and were roughly the same ABV/IBU.

 

I dryhop heavy on my ipa/dipa. For a 14 gal batch I use 1 lb for whirlpool and 1 lb dryhop. I brew 14 gal batches to yeild 10 gal worth of beer after all the loses. I suppose I could use less but my beer turns out pretty good. It is sometimes hard trying to justify spending $50+ on hops per batch tho

 

Under boob sweat