Botanical Acids

A technique I mentioned a few posts ago was finally put into practice over the weekend: dry hopping. It's the process of adding hops to your brew after the primary fermentation has taken place.

The purpose of this is to give your beer even more a hoppy aroma and flavor. If you've ever tried IPAs or other beers with a floral taste, dry hopping is probably the culprit. However a significant characteristic of drying hopping is that it doesn't increase the bitterness of your beer. Essentially you're grabbing the flavor of the hops without adding bitterness.

The reason behind this is the way in which hops bitter beer. Each variety of hops has something called an alpha acid rating, which signifies what % of the hops is alpha acids/oils. The more alpha acids, the more bitter a beer will be. However, this relates to dry hopping because alpha acids are only released when the hops are boiled. Since there is no boiling taking place with dry hopping, no alpha acids are released and the beer is not bittered at all.

Alpha acid 5.7%

Alpha acids during boil actually plays a big role in recipes. Oftentimes they'll call for multiple varieties types of hops, one boiled for a long time for bittering and then one boiled minimally for flavor. For example, the White House Honey Ale recipe (which I brewed in honor of President's Day) calls for Kent Goldings hops to be boiled for 45 minutes, then the fuggles for just the very last minute.

Anyways, back to my dry hopping experiment. I created a pretty simple pale ale as the base. My main decisions were in the hops to use. During the boil, I went with warrior hops, which have an extremely high alpha acid rating of ~16%. They are commonly used for bittering purposes, especially in IPAs.

For the dry hopping, fuggles were the hops of choice as they were one of the suggested varieties and add an will give the beer an earthy flavor/aroma. As you can see above, the alpha is 5.7%, which is significantly lower than the warrior hops; but I'm using them both for different purposes.

You can get whole hops, but the pellets work just as well

Anyways, the process was quite simple, as I just cut the bags open and threw them into the fermentor. There are other methods involving strainers, but this was fine for a first attempt.

Now just a couple final things to note. One of the first thoughts that came to my mind was sanitization, which is the most important part of brewing. Everything that ever comes into contact with the beer is sterilized via boiling or otherwise. However, we're not boiling these hops... and I'm certainly not going to soak them in a sanitizing agent; so adding them sounds like we might be asking for an infection.

However, we do have a few things going for us. The fermentation has already taken place, so the sugars consumed and an alcohol content already exists. The hops come from clean packaging conditions (taking the open photo was actually probably the biggest risk, as minimal as it may be). Importantly, hops have anti-bacterial characteristics and were initially added to beer to act as a preservative. That preservation maybe one of the main reasons IPA (India Pale Ale's; Indian climate/distance) are so hoppy. However, that's a history to explore another day. Anyways, given all of these factors, dry hopping should be safe.

A final point I should highlight is that the hops should be left in for less than a week. If longer, they apparently start to give off too much of a grassy flavor. Hence, I'll be bottling this brew in less than a week and let you know how it turns out!