Im doing a ipa and started my dry hopping at day 10. 9 day dry hop regime. Wondering how long I can leave the beer on the yeast cake before I need to worry about off flavors from the yeast.
Thanks,
Sours even longer… IPA would be about 4-6 weeks typically then keg it and drop the stainless hop tea ball tied off to light fishing line and carb. Take a sample every 5 days until it hits stride and remove the tea ball or just leave it in there.
Certainly a couple of weeks will not be a problem as long as your beer is kept reasonably cool. So no reason to be concerned.
Are you aware that there is scientific research that shows that it only takes 2 to 3 days to produce the full effect of dry-hopping? You could easily reduce your contact time significantly.
Wow, looks wasteful on hops to me, but what do I know, I’m a malthead. I bet you’ll get identical results by eliminating the 30, 15, and 10 minute additions of Citra, and adding all your dry hops for 3-4 days. Simplify and be amazed.
As Martin said in his post, there has been research published that you get the oils from the hops in 3-4 days, longer and you are getting vegetal compounds.
I recently bottled a couple non-sour, non-brett beers that had aged on the trub for nine and ten months with no beef broth flavors. I wouldn’t let hoppy beers go any longer than necessary just to avoid losing the hop flavor but I would not panic over a few weeks on the trub.
Off-flavors from settled yeast aren’t a factor of time as much as they are yeast health. You can definitely buy a good amount of time if you pitched the right amount of healthy yeast to start, provided ample nutrients (O2, FAN, Ca, Zn, etc.), properly controlled the temperature of fermentation, and maintained controlled temp after fermentation is complete.
After a longer-than-normal primary (>2 weeks or so), I’m more concerned with the yeast slurry than the beer sitting on top.
I recently wrapped up an experiment that was supposed to gauge the repeat-ability of brewing the same beer with multiple generations of a sacch/brett mixed slurry.
Because the majority of the mix was Wyeast 3724, the first generation stalled and required about a month in primary at 75F.
Even though the 2nd and 3rd generations were ready for transfer much sooner, the damage was done. The 2nd gen beer is lovely but has the slightest hint of warmth from higher alcohols. The 3rd beer is a complete mess.
To what are you attributing that differential in results? Stressed yeast from sitting in the fermenter? I’m not sure I buy that theory. I’ve stored yeast for long periods and not had off flavors from subsequent generations.
Just off the top of my head I would think that repeatability with subsequent generations of a mixed slurry is difficult since you can’t control the proportion of the components of the slurry. I’m not intending to crap all over your experiment, so apologies if this comes across that way. Quite the opposite, I think those sorts of experiments are important for each of us to better understand our ingredients and processes.
Definitely valid concerns, and I definitely jumped to this conclusion (which I just got done complaining about in another thread ;D)
I intend on repeating the experiment with a conical to eliminate this variable. The decline in yeast health could have been caused by something else I’m not accounting for. It was my initial conclusion because, in general, my yeast handling practices are pretty good.
If anything, the extended period in primary didn’t help. In general, slurry viability will be higher when stored cold vs at fermentation temps. I just can’t think of anything else that would have affected the viability so dramatically.
Cool. I’ll look for that thread. I don’t care for brett, so I may have skipped the thread if it was referenced.
FWIW, I typically build up a starter from my slurries so that may help reduce any impacts from older stressed yeast from the previous ferment. But that would only further complicate your ability to gauge percentages.