I'll add, one should consider individual taste - or even genetics - may affect perception, before condemning a common brewing practice. I've been bio-hopping all of my neipas for the last two years and I have never gotten any comments wrt "overripe" or worse hop characters. Quite the contrary, indeed. You just might be the outlier...
Cheers!
I would agree with you. People perceive a lot of compounds in beer and food and many other things totally different. Some people have higher or lower thresholds for certain compounds than others.
That being said there are plenty of studies and sensory data you can find out there in regards to the sulfur compounds created by yeast and contact time with high alpha hops and the detrimental effect it can have on the yeast and in turn beer. Some people are more sensitive to those sulfur compounds than others. Once you identify those compounds you’d be amazed how many “NEIPAs” you will find them in.
Even the biggest (or at least the original) advocate for biotransformation dry hopping, Matt Brynildson recommends adding hops with less than .2 plato to go and then trying to remove as much hop and yeast material as soon as the beer passes VDK. Then he adds the second round. Their yeast floccs without virtually any help so they can keep it at higher temps and get faster extraction.
The “soft crash” technique I recommend is more to get as much yeast out of solution as possible before adding hops in order to maximize the aroma and flavor impact from those hops. Listen to professional brewer that brews top notch hoppy beers and they will tell you the same. Does t matter what style if hoppy beer it is.
Sean Lawson, Shaun Hill, Henry Nguyen, Aslin brewing, Julian Shrago, Melvin brewing, etc etc etc. A lot depends on the yeast you use and how best to get it to flocc without going too low.
In regards to pellets sinking.. pellet densities can be very different. The guys with big contracts even get to specify he density of their pellets. I always find the most impactful pellets when dry hopping are the ones that crumble easily. Most likely means there wasn’t as much heat created in the pelletizing process so you have pellets with more in tact oil content and also they don’t sink straight to the bottom.
Great MBAA podcast recently with a bunch of large commercial craft brewers talking about dry hopping techniques. Interesting to hear them say that they will have pellets instantly fall to the bottom of even really large tanks and that almost all of them used some sort of Co2 rousing except on the biggest tanks they had.