Dry Hopping: Tips from the Pros
Brewer: Bill Pengelly
Brewery: Deschutes Brewery, Bend, Ore.
Years of experience: 3.5 years
Education: Diploma from Siebel Institute in Chicago, PhD in biology from Princeton University
House Beers: Bachelor Bitter, Jubelale, Mirror Pond Pale Ale, Obsidian Stout, Cascade Golden Ale, High Desert Mild, Black Butte Porter, Bond Street Brown
The first rule about dry hopping is avoid contamination. Here at Deschutes Brewery we use acid to sanitize the bags that hold hops and the strings that tie them. But anything safe that can get into the beer and not give it an off flavor would be okay to use. You can clean the bags with bleach, but avoid sanitizing them with bleach because the bag or string would be soaked in it, and you don’t want bleach in the beer. You could also sanitize by boiling. We use sanitized rubber gloves, like surgeon’s gloves, when harvesting the hops and filling bags. It helps to avoid putting your hands on the hops and the bag.
Next you want to decide what hops to use. We use whole hops exclusively. They’re best for dry hopping because you can get them out of the beer. Pellets will leave fine particles in the beer and carry over into maybe more intense hop character than you wanted until the beer can clarify and settle.
If you are a homebrewer using pellets in the boil, you would still buy whole hops for dry hopping. Trying to contain fine particles of pellets is difficult because they will escape the bags. If you do use pellets, make sure to get a finer grade of hop bag. You might be able to dry hop with pellets in a secondary fermenter and rack off into a keg or bottle.
Hop teas do not work well for dry hopping because what you want is the aroma, a soluble compound, and that’s what boils off in your kettle. The whole point of dry hopping is to capture things that would boil off very easily by adding whole hops to cooled beer either in conditioning or in the final keg.
Find out what hops you like and what quantity you need to use. It all depends on the hop and how intense its aroma is. You might be more careful with some high-oil hops that are more intense than others. They would include Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, and Columbus. Some of the more noble hops like Saaz, Tettnanger, Hallertauer, and Kent Goldings are more mild and you can go heavier with them. You really just need to dry hop to taste. You can’t calculate the flavor very well.
If a homebrewer does secondary fermentation, hops could easily be added to the secondary fermenter. You don’t want them in primary fermentation. One reason is you don’t want to mess with the yeast. Another is that you’re degassing so much carbon dioxide that you’re actually scrubbing away the volatile compound and being less effective. So do it in the secondary fermenter or in the (final) container. If brewers are bottling beer obviously the secondary would be the way to do it. If you’re kegging, then you could dry hop in the keg.
The optimum time to add hops depends on the brewer. It’s good to dry hop a week or two before bottling or kegging. In the keg it will be on the dry hops the whole time. We have to keep on a schedule for production. A week is all we can do unless we use a cask. Hops go out to the account where the beer is served, but it’s on the dry hops the whole time.
For our bottle products we do it in bright beer tanks because we don’t do a secondary fermentation with our unitank system. We have to dry hop in bright beer tanks after we transfer the finished beer from fermenters and we only have a week on the dry hops.
The beers we dry hop are Bachelor Bitter, Jubelale, and Mirror Pond Pale Ale. We dry hop with Kent Goldings for the Bachelor Bitter and Jubelale and Cascade in the Mirror Pond Ale.
Our Golden Ale is a fairly low-gravity beer that has a lot of hops in it already, so it’s a bit more delicate. We didn’t want to add more hops to it. We do dry hop our porter with Tettnanger when we cask, but normally we don’t dry hop it because the porter tends to be fairly low in hops and more pronounced in malt, whereas the other beers that we like to dry hop tend to be hoppier beers: pale ale, bitter, and the Julelale, which is like a strong ale, which can take a lot more hops. We will dry hop stout in the cask with Northern Brewer, but not in normal production.
