Cold conditioning before force carb

[mijclarke]

I threw loose hops (4oz) into 5 gallon corny keg (4 gallons worth of 6.3% verdant NEIPA) and threw into fridge. Figured I should leave the hops in disturbed and was planning on carbing at least a few days after adding hops. I have a floating dip tube but am a little worried that I could have some hop burn/bite especially since one of my two hops (mosaic and centennial) had a lot of powder pour out along with the pellets.

Do you think force carbonating when hops are in suspension could create more hop burn or is my waiting for the hop sediment to settle being overly paranoid? And further would slow carbing be better than fast carbing as to not disturb the hop sediment?

 

[micraftbeer]

I'm not sure I've personally experienced hop burn, so my answers here might not be the most useful. But I would think if you're concerned about hop burn, you wouldn't plan on serving from a keg with hops in it.

Floating dip tubes work great for leaving hops behind. In my fermentors that have floating dip tubes, if I even drop the temperature to around 50F, the majority of the hop particulate gravitates to the bottom in 12-24 hours. When I ferment in my FermZilla All Rounders, I can fit the whole fermentor into my cold beer fridge and I cold crash in there for about 3 days, and then close transfer out using the floating dip tube to get beer into serving keg without hop debris. When I ferment in my conical, I can't do the 3-day 35F cold crash, so I chill the fermentor to 50F, and then after about 12 hours close transfer out (floating dip tube in my conical) into my dedicated cold crash keg that's also fitted with a floating dip tube. I then cold crash that keg for 3 days and transfer out into my serving keg.

I've never watched force carbing happen in a beer, so there's no fact-based background for this opinion, but my gut tells me that forced carbonation isn't a churning/mixing type process. I wouldn't expect it to churn up hops that have gravitated down to the bottom. So I wouldn't expect that to be something to worry about. But again, I thought if you were concerned about hop burn, you wouldn't want a layer of hop debris sitting on the bottom of your serving keg anyway.

 

[mijclarke]

Thanks for the reply. Just tasted it last night and not a bit of bitterness. I know previously using Vic secret snd mosaic I had hops in my keg that didn’t go bitter for a couple weeks so I’m not too worried anymore for this batch (mosaic and centennial). However if I don’t drink within a couple weeks I’m sure the beer at the bottom could become vegetal but I’ll be bringing it to a party in a week.

My new concern is a leaking liquid out post. I was going to rush for a new post or poppet but it was late so I took out the old one rinsed with hot water and it seems to be seated better. Before I could see a gap of space between the inside of post and poppet and also shot a geyser of beer through the post when I turned on the gas