Dry Hopping or Flame Out

[KDW]

Hi my first post here. Just restarted AG after a gap of 20 years! All going well so far, and have made some nice beers. A question to the experts on here, what is the practical difference to the finished beer by adding hops at flame out, or dry hopping. Presumably both are for aroma? Are they interchangeable?

 

[smcc]

flame out you are adding at temperature and if really done at flame out and not 75 or 80 then you will also be extracting some bitterness albeit way less than boil hops but as your wort is cooling you dont destroy all the flavour/aroma aspects they provide so thats the main reason for doing this. You could use low Alpha hops for flameout if you were worried about bitterness but its never been an issue for me. Hops boiled for 60min basically there is nothing left except the isomerised alpha acids so really dont be using expensive varieties for this step some cheap high alpha varieties are fine.

Dry hopping is pure oil extraction for aroma and flavour. Most craft breweries will do all 3 boil, whirlpool and dry hop it really depends on the style you are brewing. I have found that by omitting flameout additions the finished beer just lacks something so as I only really do hop forward beers I do all 3 adds to the cost of the brew but i focus on the end product rather than the cost.

 

[Sandimas]

I rarely dry hop these days, I can't taste the difference between that and a 30min hop steep after flameout, plus there was some discussion a while ago on whether bottle bombs were more likely to occur with a dry hop.

 

[smcc]

I do usually 8g per litre and it certainly makes a difference as far as I can taste, there are enzymes in hops which can break down some of the longer dextrins which can cause additional fermentation known as hop creep I would be surprised if there was sufficient co2 produced to explode bottle, bigger issue can be diacytl as you get secondary fermentation but temp doesnt rise enough to clean it up. If you are bottle conditioning I wouldnt expect this to be an issue as you have proper secondary fermentation at temp