Brewers break sanitisation rules and dry hop?

[Shamus O'Sean]

Following this conversation because it is interesting.

A few on the Forum have said using a coffee plunger for hop teas is excellent.  

My view on your questions is I can see no issue with adding a hop tea when you would normally dry hop.  Good sanitisation is important.  The tea should be cooled but does not have to be cold.  Adding 1L of 60°C water to 22L of 20°C wort only raises the overall temperature by a degree or two.

I also agree that you do need to account for the extra litre in the hop tea.  In addition to diluting your brew and dropping the ABV, it will drop the IBU's and the EBC's.

[lickedthestamp]

12 minutes ago, Shamus O'Sean said:

Following this conversation because it is interesting.

A few on the Forum have said using a coffee plunger for hop teas is excellent.  

My view on your questions is I can see no issue with adding a hop tea when you would normally dry hop.  Good sanitisation is important.  The tea should be cooled but does not have to be cold.  Adding 1L of 60°C water to 22L of 20°C wort only raises the overall temperature by a degree or two.

I also agree that you do need to account for the extra litre in the hop tea.  In addition to diluting your brew and dropping the ABV, it will drop the IBU's and the EBC's.

Thanks @Shamus O'Sean - appreciate your thoughts! 

I like the idea of the 'hop tea' as the 2 things that I worried about re: dry hopping was 1) the increased infection risk and 2) the little bits of hops that escaped the Chux and got into the brew. As it was my first time doing it I was probably overly-concerned by both  

Thinking I might try the 'hop tea' method as opposed to adding the full amount of hops into the steeped crystal malt liquid, but not sure yet as to when to add the hop tea to the FV - before pitching or later when you would normally dry hop? Hmmm... 

[ben 10]

On 10/22/2020 at 1:55 PM, pilotsh said:

minimises the risk of infection!

You are over thinking it.

DRy hop, there is not an issue.

[Hairy]

9 hours ago, Shamus O'Sean said:

Following this conversation because it is interesting.

A few on the Forum have said using a coffee plunger for hop teas is excellent.  

My view on your questions is I can see no issue with adding a hop tea when you would normally dry hop.  Good sanitisation is important.  The tea should be cooled but does not have to be cold.  Adding 1L of 60°C water to 22L of 20°C wort only raises the overall temperature by a degree or two.

I also agree that you do need to account for the extra litre in the hop tea.  In addition to diluting your brew and dropping the ABV, it will drop the IBU's and the EBC's.

I have done this a few times but haven't done it in a while. Not to replace dry hopping but more to increase the late/flameout hopping. I have done it using just water and also wort. If you use wort then you need to make sure you give it time to ferment out. 

I also don't bother accounting for the extra litre as it really doesn't make that much difference to end result.

[Journeyman]

11 hours ago, lickedthestamp said:

Any thoughts on adding it later, say at a similar point to when you might dry hop - do you see any issues (apart from the infection risk) to adding hop tea at a later point? Off the top of my head I am thinking that you would need to let the hop tea cool down enough so it isn't too hot and also as you are adding additional liquid you would need to account for this when filling the FV  (so if adding 1L hop tea to a 23L recipe you would only fill to 22L) otherwise you would dilute the brew and reduce the ABV. 

I haven't tried adding it later - it goes in at pitch so far. The tea is made at circa 85°  and left to sit for 20 mins to half an hour, then I filter it into the wort. I doubt the small amount of tea at whatever it is down to at that point is going to affect the thermal mass of the brew very much.

Also I wouldn't worry about the maybe half litre or so extra unless you're particularly pedantic about exact measures etc.

You raise an interesting point though about trying the tea at dry hops time - I will give it a go net brew; I am planning an XPA clone that I have made several times so I should be able to tell if it has a different effect. It was the XPA that had been dry hopped where I had the 'sharp' hops taste I wasn't too fussed about. I was surprised because although I changed the recipe a bit (instead of doing 25g simcoe, 12.5g lemon drop in the boil and the same as a dry hop I did the boil with 25g mosaic/12.5 LD then 12.5 each of mosaic, simcoe and LD - I ran out of simcoe.

I wasn't expecting the hops flavour hit just because I'd used mosaic but it was also the 1st time I'd made it with dry hop instead of a tea. Now it has mellowed, I can still say it is different to previous brews but it's very YUM! I think if I dry hop again I'll be doing it with something I can let sit in the keg a few weeks to mellow out.

[lickedthestamp]

So I have another Fair Drinkum pale ale on the go and today rather than dry hopping I decided to add the remaining 25g of Vic Secret/Enigma hops via a hop tea.

Boiled 1L of water, let it cool to approx. 77°C and then steeped the hops in a coffee plunger for about 45mins (was going to be 30mins but lost track of time )

Temp of the hop tea was about 45°C when I added it to the FV. Wort temp then increased by about 1°C before it dropped back down to 19°C after an hour or so.

Be interesting to see what the result is like 

[lickedthestamp]

So just thought I should follow up here on the result of the hop tea addition.

It's been about 4 weeks since Fair Drinkum No.2 (FD2) was bottled and by this time the hops fade in the dry-hopped Fair Drinkum No.1 (FD1) was very noticeable.

The hops flavour in FD1 initially was also very fruit-forward (lots of passionfruit to me) and it was this that faded quite noticeably in a short space of time.

This time in FD2 the hops flavour was a bit different in that the fruity-ness was less pronounced and there was a bit more grassy(?) notes. I am thinking that perhaps leaving the hops to steep for 45mins rather than just 20-30min may have contributed to this changed flavour profile? However, while the fruit flavour was more subtle it has actually lasted better/more consistently after 4 weeks than it did in FD1.

So... while just my first go at a hop tea I am definitely going to do it again. Even though I did slightly prefer the more fruit-forward flavour of FD1, I think (hope) that by steeping the hop tea for less time that it might reduce the grassy notes that were more present in FD2 - while hopefully also retaining the hop flavour for longer. 

 

[Pickles Jones]

3 minutes ago, lickedthestamp said:

So just thought I should follow up here on the result of the hop tea addition.

It's been about 4 weeks since Fair Drinkum No.2 (FD2) was bottled and by this time the hops fade in the dry-hopped Fair Drinkum No.1 (FD1) was very noticeable.

The hops flavour in FD1 initially was also very fruit-forward (lots of passionfruit to me) and it was this that faded quite noticeably in a short space of time.

This time in FD2 the hops flavour was a bit different in that the fruity-ness was less pronounced and there was a bit more grassy(?) notes. I am thinking that perhaps leaving the hops to steep for 45mins rather than just 20-30min may have contributed to this changed flavour profile? However, while the fruit flavour was more subtle it has actually lasted better/more consistently after 4 weeks than it did in FD1.

So... while just my first go at a hop tea I am definitely going to do it again. Even though I did slightly prefer the more fruit-forward flavour of FD1, I think (hope) that by steeping the hop tea for less time that it might reduce the grassy notes that were more present in FD2 - while hopefully also retaining the hop flavour for longer. 

 

Getting the hop flavours into the mix and having them stay around is a real hit and miss process and you can only work with the results at the time. It can be a long lead time before you get the next batch ready to drink and if any adjustments have made a better beer.

But that's half the fun in brewing.... the next one will be perfect. I hope!

[ScottyMac]

I've had some mixed results with the dry hopping.  I asked in another thread if I was doing something wrong and asked people to tell me how they went about it.  I thought i might have had some bad hops.  

I'm going to do a side by side IPA with one dry hop and the other with just the hops from the boil.  I will se how that goes.