Probably 10th keg I have brewed overall, first time doing a recipe with dry hopping. Doing the Conundrum IPA. Followed recipe and added dry hops to 2nd Ferm a few days before kegging. Rack day I attempt to siphon into the keg and there is so much debris I know I sucked some into the keg. I do not have any filtration system but I do have an empty keg for the next week, both the standard new NB dual keg system.
I pressurized the IPA for 2 days and cooled it in the kegerator. Lowered it down to 8psi, bled the co2, and went to get first glass and it instantly clogged. After troubleshooting it down to the keg beer line dispenser port, I discover the spring and pin inside is completely full of hops. It made a spectacular mess in the process too. The wife had to laugh since I was covered in what smelled like AWESOME IPA.
Sadly now I have this 5 gallon pressurized keg of beer I can’t get out. I don’t think I can go buy a filter because it would still need to come out of the keg. I imagine that eventually it “should settle” to the bottom and perhaps I can siphon it out again? Can you siphon carbonated beer? I am using delux NB kit siphon. Anyone have any good suggestions to at least get the large clogging chunks out. At this point I just might invite all my friends over and just manually pour it out of the top lol. It’d be a shame, this seems like a good long drinking keg too.
Also any tips on siphoning off dry hopped beer in fermenters this in the future and preventing this mess is appreciated. Like, is pouring it through a coffee filter viable before kegging? Now that it is pressurize i imagine doing that would be a horrendous foamy mess.
I don’t see any reason you couldn’t cold crash it and siphon it out into another keg.
In the future, if you have the ability to do so, I would suggest cold crashing the dry hopped beer for a good 48 hours to drop as much hops out of suspension as possible before you rack it to a keg next time. Be sure when you siphon it to leave the end of the siphon above the level of hop material that has dropped out and try not to disturb it very much so it doesn’t kick up any hop material.
Also, some people dry hop in a sanitized muslin bag to reduce the amount of hop material in the finished beer. This should help reduce some of the hop material in the beer.
Instead of siphoning, which will be a mess and could lead to oxidation, I suggest maybe this:
-Depressurize the keg
-Pull the dip tube and trim off ~1" (clean any hops out of the poppet while you have things apart)
-Replace the dip tube
-cold crash keg to get all hops to settle out
-make a keg jumper (‘out’ to ‘out’ on the kegs so it fills the new keg from the bottom)
-transfer beer to clean keg by pushing it via CO2 and pulling the release valve on the new keg. Should leave all the crashed hops behind.
This is my method for moving a keg that I’ve fined and have clear but want to travel with it and don’t want to deal with all the sediment getting stirred up. Also used it on a keg where I did the same thing as you, got too much hops transferred over when racking from the fermentor.
All good advise from above. In future why not dry hop in the keg? Put the hops in a fine mesh nylon bag and attach to dip tube. I learned that from this forum and it has worked well for me.
I have also used “spice balls” that look like big tea balls to dry hop in the keg. You will need a few for whole hops but one works with pellets. The advantage is they won’t get sucked into the dip tube like a mesh bag can.
