Getting dry hoped pellets to settle

[week0019]

After reading lots of options for dry hoping, I decided to just toss my 2 oz of pellet hops in the 5 gallon secondary with the expectation that they'd settle. It's been 5 days now and almost all of the hop mass is still hanging strong on top of the beer.
Wondering if these will settle in time for racking to bottling bucket this weekend. Do I need to start thinking about cold crashing, and if so, how long before bottling?
I know one option is to filter the intake end of the siphon but I'd really rather not complicate the siphoning process. I seem to be siphonally challenged as it is.
If anyone has some input on when the hops will settle or forcing it with cold crashing I'd really like to hear.
Thanks!

 

[day_trippr]

I've never waited for pellet mush to settle because I actually don't want it to be in the beer more than five or six days, and in my experience it doesn't even come close to settling on its own that quickly. I always cold-crash my dry hopped brews before kegging, and the mush will be tight to the bottom of the carboy within a day or so. You could then mix the cleared brew with your priming sugar in a bottling bucket straight away...

Cheers!

 

[brewguyver]

I've never waited for pellet mush to settle because I actually don't want it to be in the beer more than five or six days, and in my experience it doesn't even come close to settling on its own that quickly. I always cold-crash my dry hopped brews before kegging, and the mush will be tight to the bottom of the carboy within a day or so. You could then mix the cleared brew with your priming sugar in a bottling bucket straight away...

Cheers!

+1 - if you stir you'll kick up all the crap (technical term) at the bottom. Either bag-em and cold crash, or don't bag em and still cold crash.

I'll be doing something similar with my cream and blond ale, but with the addition of isinglass in the keg to really control the hops.

 

[week0019]

Thanks!! So I'm shooting for around 45-50F then right? I'll see if I can rig up some ice cooled bath and get those hops to settle.

 

[MadCnty]

I do not dry hop in a keg, but I do dry hop in primary (after hitting FG)... What I do is I use a hop bag (cheap and easy IMHO) soaked in sanitizer... I then fill with hops and a left over ss washer (from building my mash tun, and also sanitized) and drop it slowly into the beer...

 

[week0019]

Well I bottled last night. After two days of somewhat of a cold crash (could only get to about 50 degrees keeping the fermenter in an iced water tub) most of the hops had settled but not all. I'm guessing if I had gotten it colder they would have all settled.
Anyway worked for the most part I think only the last couple bottles will have hop chunks in them.
Thanks for all the input! Just a few more weeks and I'll get to try my Jawbreaker pale ale!

 

[day_trippr]

Sorry, I missed your question re: how cold is "cold crashing". The answer is pretty much "as cold as you can get it". So 45-50 degrees would be more like "gentle cooling"

When I cold-crash I set my fridge controller for 34°F. 10 gallons will take nearly two days to get there - and this is a full-size top-freezer fridge. But after two days all of the hop mush is glued to the bottom...

Cheers!

 

[week0019]

No problem, adding ice as fast as I could make it only got me to about 50 so even if I had known to go colder I wouldn't have gotten there. I think it all ended up good. Huge improvement over room temp anyway.

 

[Glynn]

When I dry hop I swirl my secondary once a day for the first 3 days, which helps the hops to settle

 

[Matchak]

I was just having the exact same problem And I had to move my secondary fermenter. I carried it Into another room and about 95% of all the floating hops sank straight to the bottom.

 

[aarondl]

I tried bottling by getting below the hop level, which has been recommended in other threads. This failed miserably. The floating hops were disturbed, and pieces kept getting sucked into the hose and kept clogging it. I ended up having to stop and rerack the beer, I might have just ruined the batch. Sadly a bunch of hops still made it into the reracked batch, and I'm going to have to deal with it the same way. I'll probably just end up having to cold crash it. Hopefully this will work or my IPA will be going down the drain.

 

[matt2778]

My trick is to grab a five gallon nylon paint strainer bag(couple dollars at either lowes or Home Depot) and after sanitizing it I put in the primary and proceed to rack to either a keg or bottling bucket. The paint strainer bags conviently have and elastic band that holds them securely to the rim of the standard ale pale. I dry hop with loose pellets and even six ounces in a dipa is no issue for this technique. I do still cold crash to drop the yeast in a nice tight cake as the paint strainer will do nothing for suspended yeast.

 

[WNCBrewman]

If you do decide to cold crash with isinglass, make sure you don't try hop when the beer is really cold. In other words, dry hop decently warm or before you start the cold crash. I just dry hopped after an insinglass cold crashed beer after a week, and the hops went straight to the bottom and never flavored the beer well. I'm thinking next time I will rack to secondary, cold crash 1 week, raise temp back up to primary temps, dry hops, then cold crash again for two weeks. Will probably make a great beer. After using the isinglass and cold crashing for two weeks, the beer was crystal clear and still had plenty of yeast still to carb up the beer, so the extra week crashing I am confident will not affect bottle conditioning carbing.