Dry Hopping For Dummies.

[CarlosHernandez]

Great tip!

[biertourist]

I dry hop exactly the way I do a cross examination:
Get in, hit hard, get out, and don't leave a mess.
I hop heavily for a very brief period a day or two is the most I'll leave the beer on the hops then I rack it off and bottle. I've found that when I leave the beer and hops together over long I get grassiness.
.

This mirrors my experience exactly. Dry hopping for too long == grassiness and haze from hop polyphenols. I'd rather dry hop with a larger amount of hops for a shorter period of time.

I'd love to know for anyone who uses finings to get that last bit of clarity if you use finings before or after dry hopping. I'd be afraid that the finings might pull some of those great hop oils out of solution, but I actually WANT to pull the hop polyphenols out of solution to prevent the later formation of chill haze.

-I'm going to dry hop my current beer FIRST and then use PolyClar (PVPP) which I'm hoping, because it works via absorption and not electrostatic forces that it will just pull polyphenols out of solution and not the hop oils.


Adam

[dontblake]

If dry hopping, I'll go into a secondary. I reuse my primary yeast several times, so that's a good reason to not dry hop in the primary and to rack to secondary. If I'm not dry hopping or fining, I'll go straight from the primary into a keg.

Or just dry hop in a keg (using a muslin bag with some plain dental floss tied to it for easy extraction).

Anybody have any good advice to keep the hop particles screened out ?