Whirlpool/hopstand vs dryhop

The Homebrew Forum

Help Support The Homebrew Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
It would be much lower at 80c, having not being boiled for 10 minutes also.
Ps DD2 I whirlpool ipa's @75c with usually about 150g and upto 50g in dry hop and that hits my bitterness limit and certainly her indoors who is seems to detect bitterness more than me
 
Hi Hazlewood I adjust my recipes for IBU's and perceived bitterness but 300g of most IPA style hops would be too bitter for me, 200g is my max in total
Yes, I think it would unless you took your hopstand down to 70C or even a little lower - but you can get nice flavours from some lower AA hops. Also, you would skip the addition of any bittering hops and just rely on bitterness from the hopstand.

You can also make the beer strong where you need extra bitterness to balance the flavour, aim for about 8%. 😉
 
Never use bittering hops H even in a bitter I use the hops in the recipes to give me the bitteringathumb..
 
Dried hops won't "smell odd or anything" as they age. Think of them like a herb. They will lose some of their nice aroma/flavour as they get old (freezing/removing oxygen drastically helps this) but they won't "go off".

You clearly haven't kept them long enough.🤣 Perhaps not "off" but they defo get a "cheese" pong.
 
Just kegged a basic pale ale and added 10ml of this to the keg. Smells lovely
IMG_2463.jpeg
 
I have used these kind of flavours like peach,Rhubarb,Gooseberry etc they can add a nice taste to a IPA that has not worked out but they do taste a little artificial but they can rescue a beer
 
Are they easy to dissolve?
It’s a liquid and not really that thick. I just pour into the keg when filling and it mixes well. It’s just pure hop extract so no bitterness just flavour and aroma. It lasted to the end of the last keg as well and that took a few months to empty.
 
Bitterness from a hop stand is usually astringency from forgetting to use acid first to lower the pH.

If you dry hop longer than 2 days then the oils actually go back into the hops ref. Also if you dry hop before cold crash and remove yeast then the oils stick to the yeast and get dragged out of solution or go inside the yeast cell ref.
 
Last edited:
Bitterness from a hop stand is usually astringency from forgetting to use acid first to lower the pH.

If you dry hop longer than 2 days then the oils actually go back into the hops. Also if you dry hop before cold crash and remove yeast then the oils stick to the yeast and get dragged out of solution.
I now add Lactic acid with my dry hop and do not dry hop for more than 2 days which I think helps but no scientific proof from my doings.
I had read that PH was a factor in dry hop bitterness so I have been adding acid for a while usually 2ml of Lactic and I have not noticed any acidic taste with the beer
 
While this is true from a scientific perspective I’m not sure how much difference it makes in practice. There’s quite a lot of science that can be demonstrated but I for one can’t actually tell the difference in practice.

Having said all that, unless I’m dry hopping during active fermentation in order to exploit biotransformation, I dry hop on day 9 of fermentation where primary fermentation is complete because the alcohol concentration is pretty much at maximum and these hydrophobic hop oils ARE soluble in alcohol.
 
Brewing in the traditional British ale way using early kettle hops and a long boil, rather than using modern US hazy techniques, may actually give you more control over bitterness.
 
If you don't like bitter beers, heavy dry hopping may not be the answer. It's not all about isomerised hop acids.

"Humulinones can create about two-thirds as much bitterness as iso-alpha acids, but are beer-soluble and are absorbed fairly quickly during dry-hopping."

https://www.beervanablog.com/beervana/2017/4/17/yes-dry-hopping-does-add-bitterness-to-beer
There’s a couple of paragraphs about this in the Janish book The New IPA where research demonstrated that humulinones come from dry hops and provide bitterness but at the same time those dry hops absorb iso-alpha-acids, reducing bitterness 🤷‍♂️.

The net result is that a beer with low iso-alpha-acid bitterness becomes more bitter through dry hopping and a beer that has higher iso-alpha-acid bitterness becomes less bitter. The transition point being about 25IBU.

This might support your follow-up comment about not dry hopping at all if you prefer a lower level of bitterness.
 
Back
Top