I am dry Hopping my Dry Dock Breakwater Pale Ale this weekend. My first attempt in dry hopping had my batch have quite a bit of sediment in it and ended up wasting some wort. My yield was not as good as previous batches. Any suggestions and hint on better ways to dry hop?
What is your current process? Do you use pellet or whole hops? Do you throw them straight in or use a mesh bag?
Based on your comment about sediment, I’m going to guess that you’re using pellet hops and not bagging them. The easiest way to separate your beer from wort when using pellet hops is to use a bag, such as: http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/muslin-mesh-bag.html. Add some sanitized food safe objects such as marbles or stainless steel bolts to the bag so it does not float.
You do the same with whole leaf hops, although I grew to prefer adding them to the carboy directly and carefully racking the beer off when done.
An alternative to bagging the hops (which may reduce utilization?) - bag the racking cane.
I did my first pellet dry hop in my recent Dead Ringer (I normally use leaf hops) and had concerns with sediment also. When racking to my bottling bucket, I tied a sanitized grain bag around the bottom of the Autosiphon to hold back the gunk, and it did just fine. No problems with keeping the siphon going and the beer left behind was pretty small. YMMV, of course.
