Dry hopping during active primary fermentation?

I was thinking of pouring my dry hop additions in with my yeast.  Has anyone done this and any good or bad results? Since there’s no alcohol present yet, increased risk of contamination?

I have not dry hopped when pitching yeast but after 2-3 days durning high krausen for biotransformation. Should help result in haziness for NEIPA. I have my first attempt at this in fermenter now but seems like it worked. I’m not concerned with contamination.

Does doing this scrub a lot of the hop aroma out when the beer ferments?  That would be my concern.

Good question. I am also very interested in hop taste longevity.  I don’t drink my beers all that quickly and my dry hopping fades. Trying to figure a way to have a more stable long-term taste.

I prefer to get the beer away from the yeast before dry hopping.

I’ve done close to this. I once added the dry hops the day after pitching. Fermentation was well underway but it was also well before high krausen. This early dry hopping added a hop punch, but it wasn’t as strong as what I get with more traditional dry hopping. Some scrubbing probably occurred but also a lot of the hop particles stayed atop the krausen foam and ended up on the sidewall when the krausen fell. So any benefit (and personally I don’t think there is any) would be at least partially offset by these considerations.

I’ve tried most of the dry hopping permutations for a NEIPA. IMO, none of them make a superior beer compared to a traditional, single dry-hop charge after fermentation is over.

There’s always some risk of contamination from dry hopping but it’s probably very low, and it would be mitigated by healthy yeast and optimized wort.

I dry hop in the keg (in a bag) and the aroma is there until the end.

I have always done this as well, Denny.  However, when I made my most recent Black IPA, I dry hopped in the conical fermenter without first burping out the yeast.  I did this because I did not have room at the time to transfer to a secondary and the beer came out great, even won a medal with it.  But I still prefer to get the beer off the yeast before adding the dry hops.

I’ve had my best results dry hopping after cold crashing, but even then after a couple weeks beers with heavy late hopping are just a shadow of what they were when fresh. I’m sure there must be a way to keep those flavors and aromas longer, but I haven’t found it [yet].

I’ve found that using cryo hops for dry hopping helps a lot.

Nobody’s found the answer,  it seems.  British brewers generally won’t supply dry hopped beers to accounts with insufficient turnover to finish the cask within four days.

This is a supposedly common practice for hazy beers and people talk a lot about biotransformation bringing out new hop flavors. I know yeast can do things to hop flavor and aroma compounds; but I’ve never seen even a serious attempt at explaining why this happens with dry hopping during primary fermentation in any way that doesn’t happen to hop compounds introduced through any post-boil additions (e.g. flameout, whirlpool).

I have one on tap right now, which, after hearing all this stuff about biotransformation, I fermented with WY1318 and dry hopped during active  fermentation.  It’s hazy all right, but I can’t say it has any distinctly different flavor I can identify,  and the aroma didn’t stick around any longer than usual.  It’s kind of boring really.

Brulosophy did an experiment on this and it turned out insignificant (dry hopped at high krausen vs end of fermentation)

http://brulosophy.com/2017/01/23/biotransformation-vs-standard-dry-hop-exbeeriment-results/

That’s a data point, not a conclusion.  Although data points are good, too.  And insignificant in what regard?

I agree its a data point, good catch. Their taste tests were insignificant as participants could not reliably pick out the odd man out in the triangle test. Anecdotally they noticed the appearance was sightly different (clear vs hazy) but that’s not something they tested…

Perhaps the only way to keep it (dryhop aroma/taste) around is dry hop in the keg.  Which I haven’t done yet. I usually end up just doing a massive whirl pool and that keeps the taste pretty stable with less of a chance of oxidation/staling

I do whirlpool and keg dry hop, both with cryo.  Currently have a Rye APA kegged 9/14 that still has huge hop flavor and aroma.

Alas, kegging all my beer isn’t an option, I normally have a dozen or more batches on hand, about half of which are dry hopped. I’m not sure if even a 20 cu.ft. keezer could accommodate that many kegs. Even if finances weren’t an issue space constraints don’t allow me that luxury so I bottle and use every tweak I can think of to keep my hoppy stuff as fresh as possible as long as possible.

I appreciate the expense angle of that many live kegs, but you can bottle from the keg, if you have a “slow mover”.  Even so, it is an expense to get started with kegs, admittedly.  I could never go back completely to bottling at this point, so maybe you are wiser than you think - once you keg…it’s hard to go back to bottling for anything but comps or gifting.

Cheers!