Lupulin after Dry Hopping

[Dan Pratt]

I've been inspecting the flowers after dry hopping and it would appear that there is heaps of bright yellow lupulin still on the flowers.

This keg dry hopped can hold 100g and I add only 56g at 19c for 5days.

When using hop socks in the boil I inspect those after and the same, bright lupulin showing inside the flowers.

Bitterness and aroma are low on these beers.

Apart from chopping them into tiny prices, what else can be done?

 

[MHB]

Well the pretty obvious answers are
Use pellets - already "chopped into tiny pieces"
Don't use a hop sock.

The other point being that hops that are dry hopped aren't really going to show the same degradation of the lupin granules that you get in the boil, it takes hot (boiling) and vigorous agitation (a rolling boil) to get hop resins into solution where they can be isomerised. Whole hops and hop bags both reduce the effectiveness of this conversion, which is why we use pellets and don't use hop bags - well part of the reason.
When dry hopping you are really dissolving some of the 250 odd aromatic compounds in the hops, more like making iced tea, cold water tea leafs in the fridge overnight, it a solvent extraction, in this case of beer water and alcohol being the main solvents.

Mark

 

[Dan Pratt]

Thanks Mark, always a wealth of knowledge.

I've always been a hop pellet brewer but couldn't pass on a bulk buy of galaxy and cascade flowers.

Still got about 200g of Galaxy left and the braumeister without conversions isn't good with flowers in the boil.

 

[MHB]

Personally I find, pellets a better overall proposition, flowers are fantastic for a while but because of the large surface area they age very quickly unless vacuum packed. Pellets being tightly compressed have a very small surface area to mass and O2 cant get at the insides, fine grinding gets you much better utilisation to.

If you want to dry hop a keg, try putting a new SS pot scrubber under the diptube, taking off the post, lifting the tube, and pushing it down into the scrubby helps.
Dry hop for a week or so then transfer to another keg, go slow and the flowers wont clog up too quickly.

Using a hop sock for late kettle hops makes sense in a BM, just make sure its big, coarse and floppy (lots of room for hops to move around), I find paint strainer bags work well. Would still be using pellets for bittering additions.
Mark

 

[Mardoo]

Dry hop for a week or so then transfer to another keg, go slow and the flowers wont clog up too quickly.

To do slow keg to keg transfers do you just make the pressure of the receiving keg closer to that of the donor keg?