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"Dry Hopping" during knockout

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  • "Dry Hopping" during knockout

    Hi all,
    I was planning on doing a 9 Bbl batch of IPA and adding 9.5# of Chinook during knockout to essentially act as a dry hop during the entirety of fermentation. I was just curious if anyone has experience doing this and if there's anything I should be worried about. Too much stress on the yeast? There will be another 10# addition of Simcoe at the end of ferm as well. Always looking to try new hopping techniques and this is something I haven't done before, so any insight would be appreciated!

  • #2
    Interested in your trials

    Frank-

    You seem to be in fairly uncharted territory. I’ve heard of breweries dryhopping in this fashion, one I know likes to actually add hot wort to the fv with the hops in there, just enough to hit 180 to denature the hop enzymes(and limit the enzymatic breakdown of dextrins) then they start cooling the wort for the rest of the transfer, and pitch yeast after cooling down enough.
    Assuming when you say dryhopping during knockout you are adding hops to fv while cooler wort is going in or simply adding the hops to the fv and knocking out onto them. I’m interested in hearing how it goes.
    My thoughts on what you will see:
    A bit of Chinook aroma being stripped during fermentation
    Lower residual extract due to the Enzymatic breakdown of dextrins early in fermentation, with more to come after the Simcoe addition later.
    Recommendations would be
    Do Not repitch the yeast

    Make sure VDK has subsided post Simcoe addition before you crash tank; i wouldn’t necessarily give the beer a real initial VDK rest, once airlock slows add the Simcoe cap tank and monitor VDK rest after that dryhop addition has been made. If yeast pitched was healthy and you give plenty of nutrient and O2 then it should be around 5 or 6 days to crash after the Simcoe dryhop.

    Good luck and hope you can report back with results

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    • #3
      So here's the info I have so far. We brewed this beer on 7/2 and reached terminal gravity of 2.5 P last Saturday 7/7 which was also when the Simcoe dry hop was added. I've had the fermenter capped and plan on crashing it tomorrow. My typical IPA's have an extended whirlpool stand with three additions, so for this batch I essentially moved an addition out of the whirlpool and into the fermenter during knockout. My initial impression before the second dry hop was that there was a more noticeable hop aroma at terminal gravity than I've experienced with strictly whirlpool additions. I'm interested to see how this impacts the hop flavor once the beer is ready to be served.

      As far as yeast, I certainly wasn't planning on repitching. We simply don't do that with any of our IPA's. Our fermentation seemed to proceed as normal with a notable exception of pH. The Mash and knockout wort both had a pH of 5.3 which is our standard target. What I did notice was that we didn't get the pH reduction during fermentation that I normally see. By day 3 we were still at a pH of 4.6 which is on the high side. Should have the beer transferred and carbed up sometime next week, so I should have a little more sensory info then.

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      • #4
        We used to do this with our hoppy ales until the demands of production forced us to become more conventional with our production beers. I do think it added a slightly more intense sense of the hops, but in a side by side comparison the difference was negligible and our need to crop yeast made the answer easy.

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