Beer Forum

This is a 2-part question.

1) In terms of aroma, any negatives to dry hopping in primary?

2) For a 1.065 AIPA, how many days after pitching the yeast (1 pack US05) would you add the dry hop? I seem to remember Tasty saying something like 5 days, before fermentation is complete...

Only issue with dry hopping in primary is that active fermentation will degrade hop aroma.

I dry hop in my primary after fermentation is complete and it works just fine.

As for the "when", each batch will be different. It should be done in 5 days but if your house is cold and your fermentation temp is like 65 it might take longer. Just wait till no more drop in hydro readings + a day or two and you should be fine.

Roguejim, this is the episode that I have gotten most all of my dry hopping information from. I dont believe they transfer to secondary for dry hopping.
http://thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/555

If anyone knows of a better or more recent episode let me know I would like to give it a listen.
-Sak

I dry hop in the late stages of primary because frankly I have no interest in cleaning out a second carboy and racking equipment. I've had a pretty immense dry hop aroma every time I've done it so no complaints here. Sure some of the hop oils are lost when they coat the cell walls of the residual yeast in suspension and strip out some of the flavor, but I make up for that by adding more dry hops or doing a two stage dry hop. It helps to use a highly flocculant English yeast that gets out of the way and lets dry hops really saturate the beer.

I was reading earlier (I think in Brewing Techniques) that mentioned the yeast can take away from the hop bitterness. Didn/t say anything about what it would do to aroma. But thought that might be worth mentioning.

I dry hopped at day 5 of fermentation. At one point, day 3, fermentation temp had reached 70-72F. At day 5, temp was back down, and no air lock activity that I waited to see.

many different ways to dryhop a beer such as time added, temp, lenght of time, etc. try diff techniques/combinations to see what your preference is. i personally add 1/2 amount to primary at the end of fermentation(1.015 ish) for 3-7 days and then crash to 50F. I then transfer to keg and dryhop in keg while rousing with co2 for another 3-7 days. only issue i can think of is the hop oils will bind to the yeast making the yeast not as viable for repitching....but then the interaction during fermentation between hops and yeast can cause things like centennial to produce wood characteristics IIRC

Sakaibrew wrote:Roguejim, this is the episode that I have gotten most all of my dry hopping information from. I dont believe they transfer to secondary for dry hopping.
http://thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/555

If anyone knows of a better or more recent episode let me know I would like to give it a listen.
-Sak

Another good source of info is any episode of Can You Brew It where Nate is the brewer.