As I've continued to experiment with NEIPAs, it's become clear to me that minimizing oxidation is key to brewing excellent examples of the style. I'm not yet at the point where I'm worried about hot side aeration, but I'm trying to do everything I can do get cold side oxygen exposure as close to zero as possible. I've switched to fully closed transfers for packaging, but now I want to address the risk of oxygen from dry hopping.
The typical advice for minimizing O2 during dry hopping is to dry hop while fermentation is still active, so that O2 in the headspace is pushed out the airlock and O2 introduced into the beer as scavenged by the yeast. The downside of this is that you lose hop flavor and aroma as CO2 bubbles away, and you have to do fairly long dry hop which many people seem to think is not ideal.
An alternative raised in this thread is to hang your dry hops in the head space of your fermenter, let them sit there during active fermentation, and then drop them into the beer at the appropriate time. I have successfully done a trial run of this in my big mouth bubbler by having a hop bag suspended on a piece of thread running through an S airlock. This is sort of a PITA to set up but I can confirm it works fine; the bag will happily hang out indefinitely at the top of the fermenter, and I can drop it into the beer whenever I want without opening the lid.
I am considering doing this for my next NEIPA. The question I have is, is it actually better than just dry hopping during active fermentation? The hops will be in contact with the beer for less time, and won't be in contact at all while it's bubbling, but they will be hanging right under the airlock for a week or more with CO2 slowly pushing around and through them into the atmosphere. Is this going to strip off flavor and aroma just as much as early dry hopping would? Or are the hops less susceptible to the loss of aromatic compounds while they're dry and still in pellet form?
I'm not sure if anyone's actually done the experiment to demonstrate conclusively whether or not this works, but I know everyone has a lot of opinions about oxygen, hops, and NEIPA brewing, and I'd love to hear them applied to this particular idea!
The typical advice for minimizing O2 during dry hopping is to dry hop while fermentation is still active, so that O2 in the headspace is pushed out the airlock and O2 introduced into the beer as scavenged by the yeast. The downside of this is that you lose hop flavor and aroma as CO2 bubbles away, and you have to do fairly long dry hop which many people seem to think is not ideal.
An alternative raised in this thread is to hang your dry hops in the head space of your fermenter, let them sit there during active fermentation, and then drop them into the beer at the appropriate time. I have successfully done a trial run of this in my big mouth bubbler by having a hop bag suspended on a piece of thread running through an S airlock. This is sort of a PITA to set up but I can confirm it works fine; the bag will happily hang out indefinitely at the top of the fermenter, and I can drop it into the beer whenever I want without opening the lid.
I am considering doing this for my next NEIPA. The question I have is, is it actually better than just dry hopping during active fermentation? The hops will be in contact with the beer for less time, and won't be in contact at all while it's bubbling, but they will be hanging right under the airlock for a week or more with CO2 slowly pushing around and through them into the atmosphere. Is this going to strip off flavor and aroma just as much as early dry hopping would? Or are the hops less susceptible to the loss of aromatic compounds while they're dry and still in pellet form?
I'm not sure if anyone's actually done the experiment to demonstrate conclusively whether or not this works, but I know everyone has a lot of opinions about oxygen, hops, and NEIPA brewing, and I'd love to hear them applied to this particular idea!