I've been thinking about dry hop creep, and have read Scott Janish's piece of doing a short and cool dry hop. I get the concept: cold-crash the beer to about 50F post-fermentation, add hops, package within a day or two. The idea is to keep the beer cool enough to minimize secondary fermentation due to enzymes in the hops, and reduce the formation of diacetyl precursors. Mr. Janish's method appears to be directed to kegging; after all, the beer can remain cold from dry hop to serving, and yeast activity is kept to a minimum the whole time. He also discusses the same in The New IPA. Neither discussion addresses how this would play out in bottle-conditioning.
My thoughts and concerns are about how would this would work for bottling. I have an IPA in fermentation now, and I plan to bottle in about a week. I will dry hop with Citra and Centennial, about 1.5 oz each into a 5.5 gallon batch. I plan to toss the pellets in directly, as I have had less-than-ideal results in the past using hops bags. But using the Janish method for bottle-conditioning would mean chilling the beer, dry hopping, then bottling and subjecting the bottled beer to room temp for conditioning. Warm to cold to warm again. This seems to defeat the whole idea of the short & cool method, and I'm concerned about excessive refermentation in the bottles (i.e., bottle-bombs).
I have only dry-hopped a few beers, and they were OK, not great. One did have a discernable diacetyl flavor, though not overpowering. Still, a flaw in a hop-forward beer.
Has anyone tried the short & cool dry hop method and bottle-conditioned their beer? If so, how did it work? Another option for me is to dry hop per usual, several days before packaging, and at normal temps (mid-60s). I could ramp up the temp a day or two before packaging, as a sort of "mini-diacetyl rest." In any case, I plan to under-carb the beer a bit, just in case.
Any thoughts, personal experiences with this?
My thoughts and concerns are about how would this would work for bottling. I have an IPA in fermentation now, and I plan to bottle in about a week. I will dry hop with Citra and Centennial, about 1.5 oz each into a 5.5 gallon batch. I plan to toss the pellets in directly, as I have had less-than-ideal results in the past using hops bags. But using the Janish method for bottle-conditioning would mean chilling the beer, dry hopping, then bottling and subjecting the bottled beer to room temp for conditioning. Warm to cold to warm again. This seems to defeat the whole idea of the short & cool method, and I'm concerned about excessive refermentation in the bottles (i.e., bottle-bombs).
I have only dry-hopped a few beers, and they were OK, not great. One did have a discernable diacetyl flavor, though not overpowering. Still, a flaw in a hop-forward beer.
Has anyone tried the short & cool dry hop method and bottle-conditioned their beer? If so, how did it work? Another option for me is to dry hop per usual, several days before packaging, and at normal temps (mid-60s). I could ramp up the temp a day or two before packaging, as a sort of "mini-diacetyl rest." In any case, I plan to under-carb the beer a bit, just in case.
Any thoughts, personal experiences with this?