Again, nobody's responding to the call for newsletter articles, forcing me to dig into the old HB archives. Thanks Fred! How many of you remember this from the first time around???

The Long-Awaited Dry Hopping Article

Today's topic is dry-hopping. Dry-hopping was probably invented by the idiot son of a 18th-century Czech brewmaster, who, when brewing a batch for his grippe-stricken father, forgot to put finishing hops in a batch. As a reward for this innovation, the local brewer's guild probably had him flayed alive, with his head stuck on a post outside guild headquarters as a mute warning to other brewers' idiot sons.

It turns out that dry-hopping (which is a stupid name for it, since the hops don't stay dry for very long, and it has nothing to do with "dry beer"--nor does it have anything to do with that _other_ activity that sounds a lot like "dry-hopping"--at least, not usually)...um, dry-hopping involves adding hops to beer after boiling, letting the hop flavor infuse the beer, producing more hop character than you could ever stick into it otherwise. Sierra Nevada and Pete's Wicked Ale are just two fine examples of the dangerous and habit-forming characteristics that dry-hopping can produce in a beer. Now, how do you do it with minimum muss & fuss? Here's a few ways:

The Fred Dry-Hopping Method

Once your beer's fermentation has slowed (or even stopped-but I think slowed would be better) rack it into a 5 gal soda keg. Take two cheesecloth socks. Fill one with hops (two ounces of Cascade, say) and the other with sanitized marbles (the marbles will weigh down the bag of hops, making sure they are immersed in the beer. You'll need quite a few marbles--very important: NO AGGIES). Tie the two bags together and put them in the soda keg. Close the top and stick a one-hole stopper with bubbler on the one of the keg's hookups. Wait a week or two, and then rack it into a priming bucket and bottle.

The advantage to this approach is easy clean-up. Once you've racked the beer out of the keg, you just reach in and pull out the two bags. Toss the one with hops, and keep the marbles for next time. Simplicity itself. Of course, you need a soda keg for this, but then, you wanted another excuse to buy one anyway, didn't you? (Ray sells them, by the way.) (Er, not anymore -- cbd.)

The Joe Kostelnik Dry-Hopping Method

Joe uses Cubetainers (soft plastic cube-shaped containers) for dry hopping. He waits until fermentation has ceased, then puts the hops and beer in a sealed cubetainer. He says the hops will sink to the bottom, and the cubetainer can be squooshed to eliminate air headspace at the top. Cubetainers are cheap. (Ray sells them, by the way.) And you can use them for lagering, which will be the subject of another article if somebody who's actually lagered writes one (I haven't, at least, except that one time).

I think Bradley just sticks the hops in the carboy, and then takes it outside and sticks a water hose in it until the hops come out. But you'd better ask him.

Anyway, there's a few ways to do it. So do it, and save me some, K?

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