A while ago instead of dry hopping I started just doing a very large whirlpool hop addition. This was because dry hopping was a pain and I was worried about oxidation (even though whirlpooling increases hot side O2). Now that brewers hardware came out with the hop dropper, and I now have a conical I am thinking about dry hopping again. Question is…do the hops just drop to the bottom like yeast during cold crash, and you keg through the racking arm as normal, or are there problems due to all the excess hop material?
Thanks.
I add my dry hops in a hop bag. Usually no more than 1 oz per small bag. I put as many bags as I want, then simply pull them out and trash them after about a week or so. Simple and very effective. When in the bag, they never sink; they always float on the top.
Yes, with a conical the hops will drop to the bottom and the beer is racked with the racking port just as you described. if you want to avoid o2 pick up you can either dry hop while fermentation is still active (but at the very final stages) or you can bleed Co2 through thread space and out the port you are dry hopping into depending on the design of your conical.
I simply open the fermenter and pour the pellets in. I timed how long that took the last few times I did it. Never more than 3 seconds. I’m not worried about gas mixing in 3 seconds, so I have no need of a hop dropper. Why not try it before you spend the money?
So have you not been dry hopping your IPAs? That is a ton of hop flavor and aroma to be missing out on. To each their own, but this is akin to refusing lottery winnings because you have to pay taxes on it. Sure you do, but you’ll still be rich!
But this case, you will not ruin the beer by having the fermenter open for a few seconds while you add dry hops. This is a very overblown concern, AFAIC.
If it makes you feel any better: do you know how dry hopping is done in a conical in a commercial brewery? The top of the fermenter is opened and the hops simply dumped in. Granted, their surface-area-to-volume ratios are very different, so it’s not exactly apples to apples. But it does take a lot longer than 3 seconds to add 33 lbs of dry hops through a small manway vs. a few ounces.
I went the other way. I stopped doing WP additions in favor of dry hopping.
Yeah, I know not dry hopping an IPA blasphemy but so far I’ve been happy with the big whirlpool addition. But if the hops drop to the bottom during cold crash and I can just pressure transfer as normal, I’m going to go back to dry hopping. Maybe with cryo-pops on the first round.
I tried eliminating dry hops for a few years many of the same reasons you did. I always found that my whirlpool-only beers were missing something in both the flavor and aroma aspects, and the extra vegetative material led to some harshness that I didn’t like. Now I’m back to dry hopping paired with a whirlpool. With cryo hops there is a lot less vegetative harshness, and I’ve started doing a small acid addition with my dry hops that really brightens the hop flavor.
I would imagine also that if you are adding pellets without a bag that they would nucleate a lot of CO2 out of the beer thus preventing air ingress.
Again, I advocate for spending money on ingredients (why not try some local or regional maltsters) rather than a piece of gear.