I dry hopped ~3.5 gallons of a sour with 1.5 oz of homegrown Cascades. No dryhop flavor after 2 weeks in the keg. Now I see why Denny talks about acidity lowering hop expression. Are my hops bunk or is dryhopping sours a waste of time?
My only experience is a dry hopped berliner weisse my friend made and it was great.
I have never dry hopped a sour but, new belgiums le terrior is dry hopped with amarillo and its great. I don’t know how they do it though.
Have you used those hops in other beers? Do you know how assertive the flavor is in your hops?
I should have mentioned that the hops are from my first pickings for 2013 so I have not used them before. I picked selectively earlier than I have ever had, but the hops appeared to be ready earlier than previous years. I recently did a second picking, but most of the hops are still on the vine.
Wort acidity in the boil lowers the bitterness (or the expression of bitterness?) extracted from hops. However, I don’t know if it affects the aroma and other oils and compounds that would be extracted from dry hopping. Could be that the sour is also overwhelming hop flavor.
Maybe I’m expecting too much of some dryhops. The beer (Kentucky Common) had almost not hop character before dryhopping, just some background bitterness. Now there is a faint citrus odor.
I find that Citra works really well with a sour beer. I would start with 1.5-3oz range and go from there. Intensity of dry hop flavor is subjective to the taster, so go with more or less depending.
FWIW, I think my Cascades are weak. After boiling a wort, I split it into 3 equal portions and did a hopstand with each portion with 4 oz of homegrown whole Cascades, 2 oz of Citra, 2 oz of Summit, respectively. The Cascade split is tasty but nowhere near the intensity of the Citra and Summit. Obviously the Citra and Summit are very powerful hops, but I thought I that doubling the Cascade would somewhat compensate.
Were the Cascade hops still wet hops or were they dried?
They were dried (over 3-4 days between window screens).