Effectively Dry Hopping at low temperatures

[MonsiuerCerveza]

Hi all. My fermenters are sluggish with changing temperature, and I'm in a tight spot. I have a canning contractor coming on Monday to can two batches of beer. Both of these beers need to be force carbed, and so need to around 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 Farenheit).

One of these beers (our IPA) hasn't been dry hopped, because one of our guys is away and no one picked up the slack - so we have four days to both dry hop and force carbonate. I don't think I can get the fermenter up to 15 (59F) or 18(64F) for even a day of dry hopping and then back down to a temperature practical for carbonation.

So my question is this - is there any kind of technique I can use to effectively dry hop at such low temperatures? I've played with the idea of drawing 100l off to dry hop in a smaller vessel and then blend with the original, but it feels inelegant and risky in terms of potential infection and oxygen exposure. Any ideas?

Cheers

[jebzter]

Any time you have to deviate from your normal process, the beer may come out differently. From a dry hopping standpoint, you need warmer temperatures to help bring the hop oils into solution, to low of temperature and the oils become way too solid and do not diffuse well. Your idea of warming some beer and dry hopping it would certainly help, but I don't know that you can get enough oils into a small batch to effectively dry hop a larger batch. If you had a smaller vessel you could recirculate through, it would likely help warm things up. My recommendation is to change your canning date if you can, because this batch won't be ready in time. That said, if it is the first time you have made it, no one will notice that it isn't right, but I wouldn't suggest to anyone that they sell beer that doesn't meet the standards they want.