Some Aspects of Dry Hopping per Schellhammer.

You might find this blog post interesting. It reviews a Presentation by Tom Schellhammer of OSU about dry hopping. Aroma vs amount, bitterness from dry hopping, and hop creep are reviewed.

Great article.  We’ll be discussing it on the next podcast.

Thanks. Great read. I had listened to a podcast about a year ago on Master Brewers about hop creep that I think Tom was involved with. This article had additional information that was great concerning amount of hops.

I think this was very similar to the BJCP seminar at Portland NHC last year.  Very good info.

Excellent article!  Thanks Jeff!

Very good article.  I found the first two topics shed light on something:  I’ve noticed in reading the British beer blogs a common complaint about American styles,  in particular NEIPA, that these beers are exceptionally bitter and astringent, but lacking in hop flavor and aroma.  Just put all the hops in at the start of the boil, the  Brits seem to say, so we’ll get lots of hoppiness without bitterness.  Opposite of the assumptions behind NEIPA.  But it makes sense now in light of this evidence of bitterness from dry hopping, especially if the bitterness from dry hopping is of a different character; and maybe the Brits are conditioned  to identify (referring to the first topic in the article) different compounds, those with lower saturation limits, as “hoppy” than some Americans do.  (So if hop creep makes all their cans of NEIPA explode, they probably won’t miss it.  Anyway, they understood and utilized hop creep long ago.)

Great article. I’ve been telling the brewers who work under many that "more dry hops"isn’t necessarily a “good thing”. The “less than 8 grams per liter” is a great reference point. I’m to make that a new house rule.

8 grams/liter is 1.07 oz/gallon in old money. I often go 4 or 5 oz dry hops in an 5 gallon batch. Last year I was trying to free up freezer space, and dumped a bunch into a batch, and it turned out rough and astringent.

The classic British rule for cask ales is 2 oz to a firkin, which is only 1.38g/L, less than 1 oz/5 US gallons.  It would be interesting if some brewers who customarily dry hop at higher rates tried this rate and reported how it compares.  If more is not necessarily more, is there some minimum rate which is sufficient and beyond which there are diminishing returns, even below 8g/L?

Does this mean, if I want to further dry out a beer, I can do a second saccarification rest postboil if I chill the wort to below the denaturation temperature before adding my charge of whirlpool hops?

Once enzymes are denatured,  there’s no bringing them back from the dead, so enzymes from malt won’t come into play.  And the enzymes in hops under discussion work at normal dry hopping temperatures,  as I understand it.  Moreover,  they are present in very small mall quantities, so they work their effects on a timescale of at least days, to weeks, not minutes.  So as I understand it,  the whirlpool doesn’t contribute to these effects, just dry hopping.

It might work if you go down to 140F or less for the whirlpool. That based on what is recommended for Amylo 300 in the mash. Time is a factor, as the beers with Amylo in the mash are not as dry as Amylo in the fermenter.

I have a Brut IPA carbing up, finished at 0.998, Amylo in the fermenter.

Normally I do not go that high, usually 2 oz or so in a 5 gallon batch for 5 days.  That said, I had a Black IPA that I entered in a competition last fall that took a silver medal.  The judges that evaluated it said it needed more aroma and would have taken a gold if the aroma was more pronounced.  I increased the dry hops 50% in this batch to see if the aroma improved.  Just kegged it yesterday (only pluggged the inlet to the inline screen once) and will see in a few days.  I can do a side by side since I still have some of the medal winning batch on tap although it is now starting to show a bit of age.

The article has also had me rethink how much dry hopping I need to do in the future, always good to learn new stuff here.  Obviously, the amount of aroma gained also depends on the variety of hops that are used in the dry hopping.  For example, I always get more aroma out of CTZ and Amarillo than I do something like Nugget or even Cascade.  Additionally, I always see some activity in the air lock after dry hopping.  I have always though that it might be from rousing up the yeast when transferring but it could also be a combination of that and some hop creep as well.  I don’t measure the gravity after dry hopping and before kegging because I thought there was really no point in it.  I may start doing this to see if there is any further attenuation as an experiment.