I am seeing people bottle/keg after month, some about six weeks, others a couple months?
What do you normally do?
I am personally thinking of three to four weeks then a week or two of dry hops, then keg it and enjoy.
I am thinking drinking roughly at the six week mark. Thoughts?
I keg but I ferment 3 weeks, keg and sit at room temp for 1-2 weeks then in the kegerator. I’m drinking it by week 6 before I lose all the good hop love.
That about covers it.
Thanks. That is what I was thinking. Thanks. I didn’t understand why you would ever age them for a long period. defeats the point.
I ferment it until it’s done. Then I give it another week or so. Then I decide if I want to drink it, and if so, I dry hop in a keg, and then 7 days later do a keg to keg transfer. If I don’t want to drink it, I hold off on dry hopping until about 3 weeks before I want to drink it, then I dry hop it for 7 days.
I usually like IPA’s, but had New Belgium’s Rampant IIPA the other day and was blown away by it’s hop character.
I have never tasted a beer that smelled and tasted like I was consumming a raw hop cone. Kinda weird and can’t say I liked it. The body, malt, color, clarity were excellent, just that raw hop taste wasnt’ for me.
I try to hold it in the low 60’s for the first 5 days or so, adding my sugar at day 3, then I let it rise to 68 for the rest of fermentation. My dry hop additions start at day 10, and by day 20-21 I want to have it in bottles to start conditioning. I add a small amount of extra yeast at bottling time to speed the carbonation process, and let it bottle condition as warm as I can. I start checking carbonation after about a week and as soon as it hits the level I want I get the rest of the bottles in the fridge to start crashing any dry hop bits that made it through to the bottles. For a DIPA I want to be drinking this as soon as possible to max out the blast of hops.
