The next time you want to get a lot of confused stares, mention dry hopping to a group of friends. In fact, you can probably mention it to a group of strangers if you feel extra daring.
Long story short, hops are usually added during the boil stage of beer making – very early on in the beer process. Dry hopping (only used in certain beers) is where hops are added after the fermentation has already begun or already taken place – somewhere in the middle of the beer process. Adding hops this late in the game adds a lot of citrusy notes without the bitterness that comes along with adding hops early. For those of you who are more visual learners, there’s a Samuel Adams commercial available online that explains it a little more.
IPAs are supposed to have a lot of citrusy hop character, so dry hopping our home brewed IPA only makes sense.
When we last left off, our concoction was sitting in a nice, quiet place while our yeast went to town creating a wonderful beer. After one whole week of this revelry, it was time to dry hop.
The instructions that came with our kit didn’t really provide a lot of guidance for dry hopping other than to “add remaining hops during transfer to secondary fermenter” and “allow to ferment another 7-10 days.” So that’s what we did. We dumped the rest of the pellet hops into the cleansed secondary fermenter and then racked the brew from the primary to the secondary. From there, we closed it up, allowed the new hops and the fermenting beer to get to know one another, and let the whole bubble for another week or so.
Seven days later we added priming sugar to give the beer carbonation, bottled, capped and let things condition (carbonate) for another two weeks.
Conclusion – This beer was outstanding. I loved it. The hops really stood on their own, as you want from an IPA. This was right up there with the wheat stout as our best beer to-date.
Ways to improve – I later discovered a few better ways to add the hops for dry hopping, including putting them in a muslin bag. That way the flavor can pass through while the leafy hops are confined and easily removed. While not the end of the world, getting an occasional hop bit stuck to your tongue can be an odd experience for both the person involved and those nearby. Also, we probably should have let the beer ferment for a few extra days before conditioning. I think the yeast was still a little too excited when we bottled them. While we didn’t have any exploding bottles, things got a little sudsy when we opened them up.
Next time – Hang on, folks. Next time we’ll graduate from mini mash and go full speed into brewing an all-grain red wheat beer. We’ll also trip over a bacteria issue and land flat on our faces. The good news: the bacteria won’t kill you. The bad news: the bacteria won’t make you stronger either.
Until next time. Cheers.
“Diary of a Mad Home Brewer” is written by Arthur Edge. It is a twice-monthly article looking at both the joys and inevitable failures of trying to brew your own beer.
Copyright 2011 The Bottle Cap Brew Blog
The Bottle Cap Brew Blog 