Hey guys I want to brew an NEIPA for my buddy’s wedding but I have concerns about oxidation. Everything that I have read said that I should blanket with CO2 but I don’t have any sort of CO2 anything and a bit tight on cash at the moment. Is there anything that you guys with more experience can recommend. Thanks in advance and cheers.
Oxidatioin shouldn’t be a problem especially when bottle conditioning. Do all your dry hopping during active fermentation and definitely don’t do a secondary
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The best advice I can give first is to practice your normal precautions when transferring your beer. Rack it “quietly” no splashing. Leave the bubbler and bung in place until everything is ready. The CO2 from fermentation will stay in your fermenter until you move the beer out.
IPAs are one of the beers that should be consumed fresh. They can lose that wonderful bitterness and aroma over a short time. I would try to schedule brewing it close to your friends wedding day. That said you still might want a little extra time in case there is a carbonation problem. It would suck if you pop one at the reception and it is flat because it just needed another week to carb. Kind of a catch 22.
There are also oxygen absorbing caps. I have never tried them but guess they couldn’t hurt.
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I don’t push or blanket with CO2 either. I have taken to only using fermenters with spigots instead of an auto siphon. This has helped my NEIPAs a bit. However I still only have a “best served by” date of about 2-3 weeks after bottling. All of my attempts at NEIPAs with biotransformed dry-hops have been completely disappointing. I only have success with very late dry-hop additions as anything earlier oxidizes out it seems.
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Thanks guys I’ll keep all this in mind. It just one of those things that keeps me hesitant. I thought I did read somewhere that this style isn’t good for bottle conditioning. Again though that’s just me Reading to much I think.
This is my NEIPA at day of bottling. 4oz of dry hop for 3.5 days and 4 oz of flame out hops. No other additions. FG reached in 2 weeks (1 week primary/1 week secondary) 7.1% abv
I anticipate this losing freshness and oxidizing to a purple brown color. I’ll try to record if/when that happens in this thread.
I rushed the fermentation because I have not had that much success with longer fermentation times and hop freshness in my bottle conditioned NEIPAs.
Awesome man keep me updated.
