Beer Forum

I watched/listened to the Pale Ale video from Brew U, and Matt Bryndilson suggested dry hopping near the end of fermentation because yeast does something technical that I can't remember to the dry hop flavor. I normally don't care much for the taste of dry hops, but I just dry hopped a beer using his advice, and I got the best dry hop flavor I've ever had in one of my own homebrews. The aroma is there, but the grassy/resiny flavor is not. The flavor is more of an intense citrus that you might get from a huge whirlpool addition. I dry hopped it Lagunitas-style with 12g Chinook, 12g Cascade, 12g Simcoe, 12g Centennial, and 8g Ahtanum...all Hop Union pellets. Beer OG was 1.057, dry hop gravity was 1.016, and the beer is currently 1.014. Beer temperature is 68-70 degrees. It'll probably go down another point or two.

Dry hopping at the end of fermentation is pretty popular because you'll end up with more hop oils in your glass. Hop oils cling to yeast cell walls and fall out of solution when yeast flocculate if you add the hops during primary fermentation. You have less hop oil loss due to adherence to yeast cell walls when you dry hop after flocculation.


There's some new research (detailed in "For the Love of Hops") that shows that some of the really fruity / tropical flavors that you can get out of some of the newer hop varieties are actually a result of chemical conversion by yeast cells, though so it definitely sound like you will end up with different FLAVORS when dry hopping in primary vs. secondary. (I find that I generally like late hop flavors better than secondary dry hop and I'm now wondering if what I really like is the flavors that I get from yeasts acting on the hop oil constituents -I'm going to try a split batch dry hop experiment where I dry hop one fermenter during primary and one during secondary and compare the results; I expect that primary dry hopping will yield more late hop-like flavors.)




Adam

I too listened to the FW CYBI shows and after trying it for the first time on Denny's Rye IPA, I was blown away by the hop character of a beer that used comparatively less overal hops than most IPA's. I just tapped a keg of IPA using Zythos and colombus in place of the centennial and cascade that UJ uses, but kept the amounts and timing the same. I dry hopped at day 3 in primary and then cold crashed, kegged and dry hopped again in the keg. Again, excellent hop character. A split batch test is probably in order, but I really do like dry hopping when the beer is within a few points of finishing, and think more homebrewers should give it a try.

When you all dry hop in the primary, are you throwing the pellets directly in the fermenter, or using a weighted hop sack?

I recently dry hopped in the primary, about 2/3 of the way through fermentation, and the pellets ended up siting on top of the wort for a week before they fell in. The krausen was down to about 1/2" when I added the hops. I (obviously) did not use a sack.

I just toss them in without a bag. I am also sure to give the fermenter a good swirl every other day just to keep the hops up in suspension for maximum contact with the beer. A good 2-3 day cold crash really helps to drop out all the hops to the bottom of the fermenter for packaging a clearer beer.