I brew beer in France. The market here is accustomed to pasteurized industrial beer. Cold storage for beers is basically unheard of. Bars typically store kegs in the basement with line coolers blowing hot air on them. Most distributors store and ship beer warm. Under these conditions, eventually additional fermentation takes place, causing service issues. Kegs which sit at the distributor in the mid-seventies for 4 months or in the basement of a bar in the 90s for a month are frequently so over-carbonated as to be unservable. I'm sure that we're not alone after talking to bars and other brewers, but I'm not inclined to let it go on the basis that we're no worse than anyone else. We almost never have issues with non-dry hopped beers, but dry hopped beers make up the majority of our sales. Kegs stored in the brewery are in a refrigerated container at 4C (~40F). I'm force carbing our kegged beers to around 2.2 volumes to give myself a bit of margin of error.
We've used a number of different strategies over the last few years. I can't say that one has been better than another in yielding stable beer. Most recently I have been dry hopping our beers warmer with the theory that at some point the enzymes present in the hop material will eventually either degrade or run out of dextrines to operate on. Frustratingly this doesn't appear to be the case. I'm definitely hitting lower and lower FGs, but it can always go lower in the package. Movement of the hop material inside the FV seems to be linked to increased enzymatic activity.
Allagash and OSU published some slides about this. They talked about dry hopping warmer and longer (which sounds like our strategy). I'm guessing some of the bigger guys manage to filter and centrifuge their beers down to yeast cell counts where fermentation isn't able to kick off again? Is there a product that could deactivate the amylases present in the hops? I haven't seen any data about whether cryo-hops have more or less issues. I also don't know whether the enzymes go into solution in the beer, or are somehow linked the the substrate of the hop material. It seems as though some sort of sterile filtration or pasteurization is the only 100% solution, but I'm looking for some insight or strategies for dealing with additional attenuation caused by dry hopping.
Here is a small sample of "Dry Hop Creep" articles I've seen recently.
Thanks,
Anthony
We've used a number of different strategies over the last few years. I can't say that one has been better than another in yielding stable beer. Most recently I have been dry hopping our beers warmer with the theory that at some point the enzymes present in the hop material will eventually either degrade or run out of dextrines to operate on. Frustratingly this doesn't appear to be the case. I'm definitely hitting lower and lower FGs, but it can always go lower in the package. Movement of the hop material inside the FV seems to be linked to increased enzymatic activity.
Allagash and OSU published some slides about this. They talked about dry hopping warmer and longer (which sounds like our strategy). I'm guessing some of the bigger guys manage to filter and centrifuge their beers down to yeast cell counts where fermentation isn't able to kick off again? Is there a product that could deactivate the amylases present in the hops? I haven't seen any data about whether cryo-hops have more or less issues. I also don't know whether the enzymes go into solution in the beer, or are somehow linked the the substrate of the hop material. It seems as though some sort of sterile filtration or pasteurization is the only 100% solution, but I'm looking for some insight or strategies for dealing with additional attenuation caused by dry hopping.
Here is a small sample of "Dry Hop Creep" articles I've seen recently.
Thanks,
Anthony
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