I just got a 6 gallon better bottle and am attempting my first dry hopping. Have about 4 gallons in the bottle and 1 ounce of Amarillo in a hop bag that is floating on the top. Now, do i need to do anything to get the hops evenly in all the beer or will this happen automatically?
Was thinking of mixing it up a bit with the racking cane the day before bottling.
The hop flavor should disperse throughout the beer OK.
You plan to rack into a bottling bucket first, right? That will take care of everything, It will mix as it racks.
Next time, you may wish to put an inert weight (e.g., stainless steel nut or two) in the hop bag and tie a line (e.g., monofilament fish line) to the bag and secure one end outside the bucket or keg (e.g., by looping it around the out post on the corny keg). You’ll want to sanitize the weight and line, of course. That should help submerge the bag and get more extraction of hop oils from your dry hops.
When I dry hop, I usually put the hops into the secondary loose and rack on top of them. Get completely mixed that way.
I should correct: it is a 5 gallon not a 6 gallon, and it has a bottling spigot I plan to use to bottle directly from the carboy.
Using a weight to keep the hop bag submerged sounds like a good idea. Thanks for the help guys.
What happens if you dry hop without any hop bag? Would this require some type of strainer/filter on the hose?
There’s really nothing gained IMO by weighting the bag. I get the same results with or without weight. You can gently swirl your fermenter once in a while to promote contact.
The hops eventually sink, or of they don’t you can just rack out from under them.
Except that it sounds like he said he was going to bottle directly from the fermenter so no racking.
Sure there’s racking, he’s just racking to bottles instead of a single vessel. 