Dry hopping

[Dustin Kerr]

Just did my first biab method.  Karl send me an epic pale ale clone.  Everything went well and beer tastes great.  I transferred the beer to a car boy and added 100 gms of hops as per recipe.  The hops now look like a green foam floating on top of the beer. Is this normal? I added the hops first then syphoned the beer. Don't know if this had anything to do with it.

Do you reckon they sink?

Am I getting all the hoppy goodness?

Thx

Dusty

[Ralph]

Yep. Pretty normal. Over a few days a number of them will sink... but I find that unless I cold crash there are still a lot of floaties! Some sort of sieve is usually in order to get beer without hop bits out of the carboy. 

Leave it a couple of days and if possible cool the whole thing down to 2 degrees or so and most of the hops will drop. 3 days is usually enough time to get all the goodness you will ever get out of the hops... leaving longer than about 7 days could be inviting grassy flavours that you do not want.

[Smiffy]

How long is it since you added the hops?

I normally leave mine in for a week before kegging, and after that time, they have sunk to the bottom.

[Peter Smith]

A very gentle rock (not swirl) often seems to help promote them  on the journey to the bottom of the fermenter (I do this on day 3 if they are not moving), and promotes more contact time, some pro brewers blast them back off the bottom with co2, its all about contact time, thats why epic apparently do a 2 stage dry hop for the pale ale, one at temp and another for longer time at low temp (around 2C).

 If you have glass carboy you can see them slowly disperse through the beer as you rock.

Re the grassy flovour,  I have had this from Motueka hops but not the US C hops.  From my experience certain hops are worse then others at this.