I’ve tried several different methods of dry hopping, looking for different ways to get that hop punch that all my favorite commercial ipas have, and am looking for other’s input as to what has worked for them. Variables include: amount of hops, length of dry hop, temperature, pellets vs whole, crash cooled before dry hop?, varieties of hops- one hop or many types, etc.
This time around I’m going to try a staggered dry hop. 1oz of colombus for 3 days, then another oz for an additional 4 days, then crash for 3 days and keg/bottle.
My brewing schedule doesn’t allow me to crash the beer prior to dryhopping, but if it did I would (since the yeast in suspension will pull hop compounds out of the beer when they settle out). I find that dry-hopping for 7-10 days at 68F, then cold-crashing a couple days, kegging, and adding a keg-hop gives lots of hop character. I also have been trending more towards heavy late additions, especially in the last five minutes of the boil, along with large dry-hop additions, to get what I want.
Dry hop with as little as .25 oz or as much as 4 oz of leaf hops, loose in a keg or in a nylon bag. Put a SureScreen on the dip tube. Keep this keg at cellar temps. Sample the keg daily until the aroma is where you want it, then put it in your fridge and serve. If you are concenred about the hops being exposed to the beer for a long time, you can do a keg to keg transfer with a jumper to get the beer off of the dry hops. i sometimes do this, but sometimes I don’t.
