All of your favorite IPAs and many of your favorite pale ales are brewed using this method, as it is a great way to add depth to beers with significant bitterness. There is little risk of contamination through dry hopping, as hops have significant antimicrobial properties which help prevent infection.
There are many ways in which hops can add flavor and depth to your brewing process or homebrew. When added early in the boil, they add bitterness. When added later, they can add flavor. If they are barely boiled, they add flavor and aroma. Dry-hopping eliminates the driving off of aroma compounds by the boil, meaning you retain the maximum amount of aroma without contributing added bitterness.
The reason the contribution provided by hops alters through the brewing process is that boiling hops changes them. It reduces delicate aromas by driving off the volatile compounds that make them up. Even when boiled only slightly, the effect is a reduction of these precious aroma compounds. As a result, the only way to truly capture a hop’s aroma is to dry hop.
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How to Dry Hop
The basic process of dry hopping, and one of the most common methods, is to simply siphon your beer out of your primary fermenter into a secondary fermenter and add hops. It is typically best to place your hops in a hop bag or other strainer in which they can be contained and still be in contact with your beer.
If your hops are whole cone hops, you can add them directly into the beer and siphon them off later, but doing so with pellet hops can result in excess hop matter being siphoned into your final packaging.
That’s the basic method. We’ll get into some fun variations here in a minute, but first we need to talk hop selection and dry hop duration.
Choosing the Right Hop Variety
The best way to choose the right hop or hops for dry hopping is to use the hops added to the recipe as aroma hops to begin with. So, if your latest hop addition in the beer was Centennial hops, try dry hopping with Centennial hops.
Alternately, you can dry hop with a complimentary hop. Again, if your last hop addition was Centennial, you can try another “C” hop, such as Cascade or Citra. The citrus aromas will work well together without clashing.
If your pale ale uses three different hops late in the boil, you can blend them when dry hopping.
Finally, for best results, you should dry hop with lower alpha acid hops when possible. Higher alpha acid hops tend to have a lower percentage of the delicate aroma oils you are going for, so using lower AA hops is really just more efficient.
You can get great results with higher AA hops, however, so this is a guideline, not a rule.
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How Long to Dry Hop?
Dry hopping is a fantastic way to get the aroma into your beer, but how long is long enough? How long is too long?
Hops added to secondary post fermentation can add significant levels of aroma in 24 hours, and it improves for at least 48-72 hours.
After that amount of time, you will still get added aroma, but not as quickly. Some brewers will leave hops in their fermenters for the entire secondary fermentation, but if this will be more than a couple of weeks, this can result in vegetal flavors, such as “grassy” notes or other off flavors.
You can leave hops in the fermenter for a week or two before the off flavors really start to develop. You won’t get a significant increase in hop aroma over the first 72 hours, but if you just can’t get to packaging in that time, it won’t hurt the beer. After 2-3 weeks, it’s really time to get the beer off your hops or you’ll start to see the bad flavors develop.
So, the ideal amount of time is about 48-72 hours. After that, package it up.
Edited By Daisy
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