It is for this reason that I thought of making a very short and basic video to show you how to dry hop your next home brew. I spoke to some other home brewers and the whole process sounded to easy for me. I work in IT and when things sound too good to be true, I question things...
- Hop Bag - can be purchased from Beerguevara or Beerlab on the cheap
- a small pot
- a scale to measure your hops
- small glass (optional) - I use this to measure out my hops and add it to the baggie
- and of course your hops!
- Sanitise the hop bag before adding it to your fermenter. You can do this easily by boiling it in some water for a couple of minutes. It air-dries quite quickly once you remove it from the boiling water (I use a fork to move it around and eventually remove it). This ensures no abnormalities or sadness in your results so this is quite important.
- Measure out the hops you are going to use to dry hop
- Open the fermenter and add the hops
Ideally you would want to dry hop in a secondary fermenter after racking the beer off the yeast. From what I have read, this could benefit the dry hopping process, however I have always done so in primary and have never had a bad result.
Secondly, and you will probably hear this from many brewers, you might want to add a small weight (which is boiled with the hop bag to sanitise it) to the baggie dropping it down and getting it in contact with more of the beer during the process. Again, I have always just tossed my bag in and have always had good results so the benefits are moot I guess. In the past I have even dry hopped without a hop bag and have not had any complications or issues - apart from having to carefully syphon off my beer.
As with anything beer related there is more than one way to do something, you just have to choose what works for you. Furthermore, you need to experiment with different hop varieties to see what works best for your beer. Read up about hop characteristics and try and match them up or use a single hop to achieve your desired flavour. Hops that are added at this stage do not add any bitterness, but only impart their flavour and aroma to your brew.
Good luck and let me know how your dry hop experiments turn out!!!