BeerBorg

Wow...that's a big IPA for sure. Two ounces of Columbus at 60 minutes is really going to give it a bite. And it's got a lot more too. Should be a tasty one.

Another thing making me wonder on this recipe and something I've never done, how do you remove the hop sack after the charge as they are saying? I've dry hopped lots of times just did it again tonight, but only do it one time and a few days before I bottle. Why not just leave the first dry hop in? Not like it's going to be a long time when you get to that point and I will do it in a secondary anyways.

I'm not sure why you would need to remove the first dry hop charge. Basically that one would be a 6 day dry hop, and there's nothing wrong with that. I've done everything from a 3 day all the way to a 7 day dry hop. Personally, I would drop them in commando anyway. As long as you can cold crash it of course. Sometimes I think that dry hopping in a hop sack doesn't allow all the goodies to come out of the hops. The hops basically become a ball and I wonder how much the center of that ball really gets to release all the aroma oil. When you go commando, there's a lot more surface area contact between the hops and the beer. The main drawback though, is the amount of hop sludge floating around if you can't/don't cold crash to drop it all out of suspension.

I agree with Chris, there's no reason to pull the hops sack out and in fact I too would throw them in commando and cold crash, If you use Irish moss it will help to clear things up too.

If you don't want to go commando with the dry hop, and feel it's important to remove the hops (which I don't, BTW), you could tie a piece of sanitized dental floss to the hop sack to use as a retrieval mechanism. Sort of like the string on a tea bag. It won't interfere with the seal of the bung since it's so thin, and it won't break very easily. Just a thought.

As far as the hops becoming a ball and not allowing good circulation and exposure, I'm not sure I agree. When I dry hop, I tie the sack at the very end of it, leaving as much room as possible for expansion. It seems to me that the pellets sort of fall apart and form a sludge, rather than a ball, and when I fish it out after racking, there's still plenty of room to the hop sack as a whole, so I figure I'm getting good enough circulation.

That's just my experience, of course, and this is obviously one of those things that comes down to Brewer's Choice.

FedoraDave wrote:I tie the sack at the very end of it, leaving as much room as possible for expansion. It seems to me that the pellets sort of fall apart and form a sludge, rather than a ball.

^^^This^^^