I feel like I over post to this forum. This is one of seven or so posts in the past month. Oh well I need lots of help. I dry hopped a double IPA about two weeks ago and today I went to do a hydrometer test. The beer has reached the final gravity specified in the recipe however there's a very noticeable cloudiness throughout the beer that appears to be because of the dry hop. My hydrometer had bits of hop stuck to its side and the beer looks very cloudy with small particles of hope floating around. I used a kitchen strainer and strained my hydrometer sample into a glass to try and get it to a more clear state but it still looks cloudy. I took a swig of the strained sample and it tastes pretty good smells great and there weren't any (that I noticed) chunks floating around in that sip. I dry hopped with 4oz of centennial pellets if it makes a difference. Any advice on what I should do to eradicate this problem before bottling? Any help would be appreciated! Again my bad for over-posting
I know products like nicotine can be used to remove cloudiness from yeast haze and trub. Could I use that?
I know it's come up in threads before, but I think the general consensus is that we tend to ignore the cloudiness and the hop chunks in our hydrometer readings. I'd like to see someone do a side-by-side on filtering or cold crashing samples and getting readings on the same batch. I bet they'd be close. I'd only worry if you are putting this beer into competitions or trying to replicate this beer exactly in the future. Otherwise, taste is king. As for your batch, the hop debris and cloudiness will usually settle out. It's ok to rack some of this into the bottling bucket. East Coast styles are becoming very accepting towards murky hoppy beers.
As inchrisin says "taste is king"! I,d bottle or keg that puppy and enjoy it. If bottling usually sediment falls,to the bottom and an easy poor will leave most In the bottle.
I use a sanitized nylon paint strainer bag over my auto-syphon when racking to the bottling bucket.This keeps 99.99% of dry hop debris and also the vast majority of the yeast cake from transferring (I jam that sucker into the bottom of the fermentor to get every last drop). I don't stress a little bit of cloudiness, as long as chunks and flakes don't make it into bottles.
I'm wondering if you guys could expand on the use of a strainer. I have the big mouth fermenter with the spigot and I will be transferring my beer to the bottling bucket via the spigot. Where should I attach the strainer bag? Maybe zip tie it to the tubing? Thanks for any input!
Sounds like that would work fine, just make sure you sanitize the paint strainer bag (obviously). Also a rubber band might work better
I don't mind haziness, but I don't want chunks in my heavily hopped IPA's! When bottling, I would use a mesh strainer bag zip-tied over the racking tube (fermenter side) along with cold crashing to drop/compact the hops before transfer. This helped a lot. Now that I keg, I have an APA with 4oz of dry hops that need to be transferred this Friday to the keg. I have a spigot on my fermenter now, so I won't be using a racking cane this time around (added for ease of transfers vs. racking cane).. Decided I will cold crash for 2 days at 35F or so and then zip tie the mesh bag on the keg side of the transfer tube this time... I will give it slack so it don't agitate the beer into the keg and once the level is high enough, will be submerged anyway... Along with the keg being purged/filled with CO2 before hand of course. I found cold crashing helped the most though... The hops just drop and compact right on the bottom. Just make sure you have an S-airlock on the fermenter so you don't suck back sanitizer though! By the way, they make removable zip ties which are NICE (sell at Home Depot and Lowes). Don't have to cut them off... They have a tab that allows them to "release" whenever and reuse them, so nice.
@Abk542, could you provide some more details: What yeast strain did you use to brew your DIPA? Did you place your dry hops in a bag? For reference, below is a photograph of my hydrometer sample of a DIPA that a brewed a few months ago. I used US-05 as my yeast and I dry hopped with a total of 4 ounces of hops (1 ounce each of Centennial, Simcoe, Amarillo and Columbus). The beer spent a total of 3 weeks in the primary: 1 week of fermentation and 2 weeks of dry hopping. Cheers!
My technique in removing cloudiness is cold crashing. It takes all of the hops to the bottom, siphon the beer off the top. I also don't pitch drop hops until fermentation is complete.
