Soooo I attempted to dry hop Jamil's Val D'or from BCS and got surprised. Beer has been in 2ndary, almost completely full in a 5 gal carboy for 4 weeks. I sanitized a bag with a string and some marbles, filled with the hops (straight from the package), and plunged it into the carboy using a sanitized copper tube. The beer grabbed onto the hops and just crawled right out of the fucking carboy. I managed to get a cap and hose on after a couple of frantic minutes of moving the carboy to a working station. Surprised the hell out of me. I have never heard of any mention of beer reacting that strongly to dry hopping. Any body know why this happened, or had it happen to them? Should I be concerned about oxidizing?? I don't know how much of a concern it should be as the beer seemed to be pushing pretty hard-maybe pushing out the O2 that was introduced? I dunno... I guess I can look forward to the new all-belgian/brett brewery I have now!

Disheartened....

I've only seen this with dry hop additions to carbonated beer in kegs. There the hops, bag and marbles once added cause some of the CO2 to come out of solution. I'd bet that this is what happened in your situation just to a lesser extent - some CO2 dissolved in your beer combined with very little headspace might cause it to foam.

Even beer that is supposedly not carbonated will have some CO2 in solution from the fermentation. The hops will provide nucleation points for the gas to collect and come out of solution. That, plus the air trapped in the pellets, will cause the foaming you describe.

Wayne

That makes sense. So all things considered, it seems to be a bunch of variables that coalesced. I'm surprised that I haven't heard of this on the pod casts or in the books when describing dry hopping, especially since I've always heard to keep your secondaries with as little head space as possible.

id say that after only a month the brett woud still be slowy activly fermenting leading to most likely more dissolved co2 than in a beer that has sat in secondary basically dormant for a week or two. thats my take on it any way.

Happened to me the first time I brewed that one as well. Except I just added the hops directly to the aging carboy. You simply had dissolved CO2 in suspension from the brett which created nucleation sites when adding your dry hops. Man, what a mess......

That's good to know, I have the same beer going in the secondary right now.