So if I were to use this technique, dry hopping in the keg but not wanting to leave the hops in contact, my question is what do you tether the free end of the “leash” to? How to get the bag suspended in the keg - trap the end of your floss/string under the O ring of the keg lid or tying it somewhere???
I used to use monofilament and tie it to the top of the diptube.
Denny, that makes sense. Thanks!
I use unwaxed dental floss and tie it the the keg handle.
Just kegged. A bit more hop matter than I’m used to from my normal practice but no biggie. Flavor of sample seemed great but too early to tell on aroma. It would be nice to standardize on a dry hop procedure. I’ve been all over the place…
Should have tried this with a recipe I was familiar with. Disappointing results but I think it’s due to the hop varieties that I used.
I am trying the 90 min hop stand for today’s brew. It’s the longest hop stand I’ve held. My induction cooktop has a temp hold feature that I’m using for the first time. At 80C I noticed it likes to let the temp drop a little too far so I bumped it up to 100C which seems to be holding the wort ~160-170*F.
I’ll most likely couple that with a 3 day cold dry hop once the beer clears. …but I’ll taste it without the dry hop to see if today’s effort had any effect.
A pro friend has talked about his IPA would lose aroma in the Brite serving tank as it went into the increasing headspace.
Another way to suspend a hop bag in a corny is to use plumbers tape. Thinner than floss, no leaks, in my experience.
You can buy lids that have a tab welded on the bottom so that you can tie off there.
I just gave the 48-hour cold (38F) dry hop thing a try. Something I noticed is that my hop pellets hadn’t really finished breaking up by the 48 hours. They were mostly ragged blobs (looks like a 6 on the Bristol scale). Has this happened to anyone else? Do I need to be shaking/swirling my fermenter for this to work?
I used 36 hrs and ended up with completely broken up hops. Maybe hop variety and/or vendor has an impact. I used Falconers Flight from More Beer.
I did a 20 min hop stand with that batch. I get good flavor but I am hoping for more.
I did a 90 min hop stand with my on deck homage to Four Wives. I haven’t tapped it yet but looking forward to seeing if it made a difference. I want to try it before I dry hop, bottle some, then dry hop and compare the two.
Is completely broken up good or bad for you? Falconer’s Flight is produced by Yakima Chief and is in honor of an old friend of mine who is no longer with us.
It would be good for me. I’m assuming that if the pellets haven’t fully dispersed, then the oils that I want in my beer are still trapped inside.
Yeah, same here. I assume the same for Brewbama, but wanted to be certain.
Yep. Good for me. I think it means I got the most contact between hops and beer.
I like the Falconers Flight and plan to use Falconers Flight 7C in an upcoming brew.
Like the Veteran’s Blend, they do a different blend every year. I find the Yakima Chief pellets dissolve a lot better than some others I’ve used. I think it’s because of the cooling they use when they make them.
Or you can put a half inch hose clamp on the bottom of the PRV on the lid and attach the line to that.
Hey, I used to do that too.
So I tried the 35 degrees 48 hour technique, except that I got too busy (newborn) and ended up letting it go 7 days. It was in a bucket, so I didn’t see what it looked like, but there was a little hop matter in the first few pours, so I assume that it dissolved okay. I have to say that I got decidedly less aroma than I would expect from the hop addition I used, though it was not a huge addition and it is not an otherwise super-hoppy beer (it’s a riff on Denny’s Waldo Lake Amber Ale recipe – smaller gravity and a touch darker/maltier than the original and with Eureka/Chinook instead of Cascade/Centennial). I only added 1 oz dry hops, but the finished beer seems more like I used 1/2 oz or maybe 1/4 oz. It’s fine – I wasn’t even going to dry hop this beer, so there’s really nothing lost to me here, but I would hesitate to try this on an IPA where I might be under-utilizing 4-6 oz of wort-absorbing aroma hops.
I will probably try it again in a blonde ale or a bitter or something else that doesn’t have a ton of aroma hops in the kettle, but so far I am wondering if Denny’s success with this technique might have something to do with his using cryo hops.
Leaving it for 7 days is part of the problem. According to the paper that got me doing this, the hops start reabsorbing the oils after 48 hours. It’s like saying I made your recipe, but I subbed for every ingredient. Yiu cant realky judge the technique, because you didn’t do it! And I’ve only used cryo once for it. The rest of my trials were with standard T90.
I agree with Denny. The whole focus of the paper was the time and how extended time was not better. I have dry hopped three successive beers using this technique and I, not totally convinced yet, do think that it does what it says.