Ask The Brewmasters

This message was posted by a user wishing to remain anonymous

Greetings! Just wanted to pick some brains about dry hop methods if I may…

I recently began with a new employer and realized our dry hop methods differ from those I have experienced in the past. 

The new (to me) method is dry hopping post cold crash at 32F (0C) and then allowing our production to mature on hops for anywhere from 5-10days with zero drops of hops or remaining yeast still in the tank.

What I had always done at my past employer was a slight temperature drop to around 65-64F (roughly 18C) then conducting our cold crash about 48-72hrs after dry hopping, then dropping hops afterwards every few days until our transfer for packaging date.

I am curious if anybody has conducted any research personally or has any citations worth noting that may explain the advantages and disadvantages to both/either of these methods (or even if I've been taught inaccurately in my career).

I appreciate any information folks are willing to share,

Cheers!

There are many ways to dry hop and different times when it is done. The "best" way is the way that works with your equipment, your yeast, is safe, and gives you the result you want.

At the first small brewery I worked at, we would just dump the hops in after fermentation ended, carb, crash, dump the bottom and transfer or filter to a brite tank. This was pre-NEIPA, the desire was bright, hoppy beer and we achieved it.

At a much larger brewery I next worked at, the desire was again bright IPA, quick turn-around of tanks, and adequate harvesting. So, we would let fermentation end, crash, harvest, then dryhop and recirc. We again achieved our goals.

Now, at a small brewery making NEIPA, we are striving for more hop flavor and haze. We were initially doing what you had been doing: crashing to 60F at end of ferm, harvesting, dry hopping, then carbing and crashing. We did get the flavor and haze we desired, but due to hop creep, we were getting over-pressured cans due to hop creep. First we tried letting the beer ferment out more after dryhopping, but this seemed to take forever.  Then we started harvesting ad dry-hopping mid ferm to allow the hop creep to occur during primary fermentation. This solved our over-pressuring, gave good flavor and aroma, and decreased our tank turn-over time. It did cut back the amount of yeast we harvest, we need to be more careful of foam overs when dry-hopping midferm, and we needed to adjust mash temperatures to compensate for the additional attenuation, but we can live with that.

So, what works best is what works.

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Alexander Kopf
Brewer
Northwoods Brewing Company
alex@northwoodsbrewingcompany.com
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This message was posted by a user wishing to remain anonymous

Definitely depends on what hop compounds you're trying to extract during your dry-hopping process.

Dry-hoping warmer on yeast will remove a good portion of myrcene. Dry-hopping cooler off of yeast will extract less myrcene. Not saying myrcene is bad, but it's a strong aroma that can mask some of your more subtle aroma compounds (i.e. fruitier ones). Definitely depends on what you're trying to accomplish, as I am just using myrcene extraction as an example - neither dry-hopping regimens are wrong, just different, though I always lean more towards 6-10°C.

Analytical Chemist

This message was posted by a user wishing to remain anonymous

I've seen it done a couple of ways and different brewers have different ideas of what works best but a lot of this is case dependent. 

Warmer will extract more aromatics faster, colder will extract slower. There becomes an upper limit to what you'll get out of these hops and at temperatures of around 60F, this plateaus around 24 hours. After that you'll start extracting the non-desirables. We did some testing to verify that at our dry hop temperatures (60F) GC testing was showing that our primary hop markers like myrcene, linalool and geraniol were plateauing around 24 hours. 

Anecdotally, I've gotten great aromatics with less flavor at crash temps as well. Hope this helps.