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Ask the Experts: Dry Hop Timing

We often get questions sent to us from home brewers who need a bit of a steer in the right direction, so we decided it would be a good idea to add our answers to the blog to share the knowledge with everyone! Feel free to email us if you have a brewing question.


Hi guys,

I brewed a batch of black IPA with one of your 5 ltr extract kits over the weekend using a recipe I tweaked from BrewToad. 

The recipe was based on a 60 minute boil, but said to add the last lot of hops after 7 days. Does that mean I should just drop them into the fermenter after 7 days? Usually I bottle at the 7-day mark. If I add the hops after 7 days, should I leave it in there for a few days more to ferment further?

Any advice would be much appreciated. 

Cheers,

George


Hi George,

When we’re dealing with the “timing” of hops in a recipe, we’re almost always dealing with a countdown (usually a number of minutes between 0 and 90 in the boil). Often dry-hopping (adding hops to the fermenter) is expressed in terms of a number of days – and it’s referring to days prior to bottling/kegging (as opposed to after a certain number of days).

The idea with dry hopping is that you wait for fermentation to slow or stop before adding the hops and you’ll get the most aroma from them (otherwise the vigorous yeast can chew through some of those volatile aroma oils and aroma will get blown out the bubbling airlock as well). If in doubt, wait until the airlock activity has slowed down, then dry-hop, and wait 3 days to bottle – a “3 day” dry hop is the most common amount of time.

Cheers, Sam.