Author: Marshall Schott
I think some have misinterpreted the fact I don’t homebrew IPA very much as meaning I don’t appreciate and enjoy the style. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is, I drink IPA all the time, it’s impossible to avoid these days, I just don’t brew it very often for myriad reasons– there are plenty of delicious commercial examples available, most of the dudes I hangout with brew enough for me to get my fix, and honestly, they require quite the financial investment. Hops are fucking expensive, especially the varieties we all pine to liberally dose our homemade beers with. When I do make an IPA, at least one of my own design and not a shitty clone version of a delicious commercial example (shut up, guys), my goal is to suck as much tropical/citrusy/fruity/danky/piney/whatever character out of the hops as possible, a goal I trust is shared among all hopheads. A common method we’ve all adopted that helps to achieve this involves adding a charge of hops, usually 2+ ounces per 5 gallon batch, toward the end of fermentation and allowing them to sit in the beer for a certain length of time to extract all of those delectable aromatic oils– the dry hop. If ever the beer gods gifted brewers with a kernel of knowledge worthy of exaltation, this would have to be it.
As the popularity of hop forward styles has grown, so too has our interest in better understanding how to utilize this precious flower. Over the years, I’ve heard many hop experts discuss various dry hopping methods, one of which caught my attention in particular. A couple years ago, I was listening to an interview with a commercial brewer, I forget who it was, but my ears perked up as he began discussing a technique he regularly used to achieve a stronger dry hop character. Rather than making a single large dry hop addition, this brewer was divvying up his hops and adding them a few days apart, a practice he said had a noticeably positive impact on his finished product. Simple as this sounded, I decided to give it a shot, and bada-bing bada-boom, A Lil’ Slack IPA was born. Even at a couple months old, this beer took second place in a BJCP sanctioned competition, both judges commenting on the pleasant hop aroma. It was enough to convince me the double dry hop method worked.
Then the annoyingly skeptical part of my brain kicked in and I began to wonder if the beer might have tasted the same had I dumped in the same amount of hops in a single huge addition. I ignored that tiny pestering voice in my head for a couple years and continued to double-dose my IPAs, each time convincing myself I could tell a difference, that my IPAs were better because of this modern method. It wasn’t until a group of buddies decided to go head-to-head in a House of Pendragon Lancelot IPA clone challenge that I decided to put this theory to the test. You see, I’m not a very competitive person, but if something as simple as splitting up a dry hop addition would better my chances, hey, why not?
| PURPOSE |
To evaluate the differences between the same beer receiving either a single or double dry hop charge.
| METHOD |
As I mentioned before, I was tasked with making a “clone” of a local favorite, Lancelot IPA (Untappd), which would later be blindly compared to versions made by 6 friends as well as the real deal. A couple days prior to brewing, I made a starter of the yeast Tommy was using for this beer, an old favorite of mine, WLP090 San Diego Super Yeast.
After a couple days, I stole a quart of this yeasty goodness for future use then threw the flask in the fridge to crash overnight. I was all mashed in by 4:30AM the following morning.
Since this would be a 6 gallon split batch, I chose to go with the no sparge method since my MLT would hold the entire volume of grist and brewing liquor.
After an hour long mash that included 3 brief stirs, I collected the very pale sweet wort.
Once the wort was added to the kettle and the flame turned on, it was time to weigh out the hops. This particular recipe called for only 2 additions, a relatively small amount of Magnum at 60 minutes and a rather large flameout/hopstand addition of multiple varieties.
This hopping schedule made for a really relaxed brew day, I almost forgot to toss my immersion chiller in the boiling wort with 15 minutes left to go. Once the boil was complete, I quickly chilled the wort to 66°F, my target fermentation temp, and racked 3 gallons into separate PET carboys, gently stirring to ensure equal distribution of kettle trub.
The fermentors were then placed in a cool fermentation chamber, the decanted starter was evenly split between the carboys, and I engaged my standard ale profile on The Block Box temp controller. Things were rocking and rolling less than 24 hours later.
The first dry hops were added 5 days into fermentation when both beers were showing signs of diminished activity. The single dry hop batch was hit with the entire 5 oz charge of hops, while the double dry hop batch received exactly half the amount of each hop. I returned 2 days later and added the other half of the hops to the double dry hop carboy. The beers were left for an additional 2 days before being crashed, fined with gelatin, and racked into their own 3 gallon kegs. After a few days on gas in the keezer, the beers were clear, carbonated, and ready for testing!
| RESULTS |
Over the course of an 18 hour period, I was able to get 15 people to participate in this xBmt including 4 BJCP provisional judges, 4 Cicerone Certified Beer Servers, a professional brewer, and a grip of other experienced craft beer drinkers and/or homebrewers. Given this sample size, 9 tasters (p<0.05) would have had to correctly select the different beer to reach a level of statistical significance. Each taster was served 2 single dry hopped samples and 1 sample from the double dry hopped batch in a relatively secluded environment. Of the 15 participants, only 4 accurately distinguished the double dry hopped beer from the single dry hopped sample, a number that falls below even that which we might expect if tasters made their decisions randomly. Statistically, the responses of those 4 who were correct in the triangle test on the subsequent comparative evaluation are meaningless, which seems about right as their responses were far from consistent. Either way, since dry hopping is typically regarded as a method to impact the aromatic qualities of beer, I figured some might be interested to know that 3 of the correct respondents believed the aroma of the beers were somewhat similar while the other participant felt they were exactly the same.
My Impressions: Biased though I was, I couldn’t tell a lick of difference between these 2 beers. I tried my hand at multiple quasi-blind triangle tests as well as more simple side-by-side comparisons and, even knowing the nature of the xBmt, I couldn’t reliably pick out the differences. Aroma, flavor, mouthfeel– all the same to me.
| DISCUSSION |
Alright, so maybe the whole double dry hop thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe there’s nothing magical that happens by adding hops in multiple doses a few days apart. Maybe those who have claimed to notice a difference (me) are deluded. Maybe.
But maybe not.
The credulous idealist side of me is at odds with the more pragmatic empiricist in me– I want so badly to believe the qualitative differences experienced by others and myself are real, yet the numbers and my own recent impressions just don’t add up, leaving me with an odd feeling that falls somewhere between disharmonious confusion and slight satisfaction. I mean, I wouldn’t mind ditching the extra dry hop step, it does require some planning (and remembering). Yet, as I sit here pondering, I find myself feeling the urge to minimize the results of this xBmt and blame them on poor design, methodical limitations, and the terrible palates of the participants. Then again… that’s just ridiculous.
I say it often, but perhaps this is yet another variable that makes more of a difference on the commercial scale than it does for homebrewers. I’m constantly preaching the perils of blindly accepting the results of these xBmts as fact and using them as an excuse to adopt potentially bad practices. Nothing is different here, this remains a single point of data, not nearly enough to comfortably settle into the couch of absolutism. But really, if I’m being totally honest, outside of any future xBmts on this topic, I’ll be making only a single trip to my carboys for dry hop additions from now on, if for no other reason than the fact it’s just simpler.
I know I’m not the only one who’s done a comparison like this and I’m deathly curious what others have experienced. Whether you’re a die-hard double dry hopper or single dry hopper for life, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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38 thoughts on “exBEERiment | Single vs. Double Dry Hop In An American IPA”
Great experiment as always. Of course I haven’t tested my method single variably, but I feel like it makes the most sense from a theoretical standpoint. My method for almost all IPAs now is to dry hop half the hops in primary, then transfer to keg, add the hops to a 1 gal paint strainer bag and suspend those towards the top of the keg using unflavored dental floss that I tie to the top of the keg. I pressurize the keg and keep it at room temp for several days, then I put it in my kegerator to carb. After the keg is carbed and I start drinking it, the bag with the hops will stay suspended towards the top of the keg so that it’s not in contact with the beer over the entire life of the keg. I feel like adding them in the keg keeps the hop aromas locked in the keg/beer as opposed to primary or secondary where they can escape. Perhaps I could just skip the first dry hop and only do the keg hops, but in general I’m kegging 10-14 days after brewing and I usually want to add the first dry hop 5-7 days after brewing, so the schedule seems to work out well with double dry hopping. Again, I’ve never tested this single variably.
The “escape” part of your justification does sound fishy; a simple test would be to have half a batch dryhopped in the keg, and another one in the fermenter. Would you be willing to exBeeriment that for us all?
I’ll add it to the list.
Not sure why you say it sounds fishy? Wouldn’t sealing the dry hops in a closed vessel trap the volatile hop aromas? And wouldn’t adding them into primary or secondary that is only sealed with an airlock allow the volatile hop aromas to escape? Without having tested it, it just sounds logical. Of course whether anyone can perceive those differences is another question. So it might not matter, but I think theoretically it sounds correct and it’s not much effort, so that’s why I do it.
Unfortunately, I only have a two tap kegerator, so I couldn’t dedicate both to a split batch like this (it’s hard enough to make room for a new 5 gal batch into one of them), but it sounds like the Brulosopher is willing to take it on.
I deemed it fishy as it sounds rather anecdotal—if it were ENTIRELY fishy, I wouldn’t have suggested an exBieriment 🙂 The main concern with these precious oil compounds is when the temperature is above their boil off point, which, if I understood correctly, is around 70°C. Below that, even if they are volatile, I would not expect that there is any difference by the sheer action of the CO² escaping—as volatile as they are, it sounds unlikely to me that they would fly away. But again, worth the exBieriment! 🙂
Ever smell your airlock? Has it smelled like the hops you put in there? I have and it does. That means that the aromas from the hops are escaping. Whether it’s a meaningful amount is the question.
To my knowledge, my airlock rarely smells like hops, but I don’t smell it much.
You’re missing out man! It smells great when fermenting an IPA!
I always catch a nose full of CO2, which burns like crazy.
Sorry, I feel terrible about it now, but I was making a shameless fart joke at your expense. Please accept my apologies. For some reason, I got the feeling that the Brulosophy site would be an appropriate depository for my immaturity, but I am coming to terms with my ignorance now.
LOL. That went right over my head!
Unfortunately, your original followup comment only added to my hilarity.
It totally is.
Yet another extremely valid and well executed Exbeeriment, which backs up my own findings over the years of single, double and triple hopping. Like Matt (above) I achieve by far the best results by dry hopping in keg (or cask). However, I don’t split the hop additions evenly between FV and keg, but use the same quantity for both – typically 100g in FV and 100g in keg. This is for a 25L batch. Yes, as pointed out in the intro, it is fucking expensive (especially as I’m buying US hops in the UK, where we can pay £6 – £7 ($9-$10) per 100g), but worth it. One of the crucial elements that influences the effectiveness of dry-hopping in the FV, for me, is temperature. I’ve always had better results by raising the temperature to around 20-21C for a few days, which seems to help the hops release more of their inner being. Dry-hop temperature could of course be the subject of another Exbeeriment, but I’m sure you’ve got a long enough list already! Keep up the great work.
I had a completely different view of how/why one would do two or more rounds of dry-hopping:
1) You want to maximize the amount of dry hops in contact with the wort without extracting unpleasant flavors
2) You add a charge of dry hops and let that sit as long as is needed to get good extraction
3) You rack off of those hops and then add a second charge of dry hops so that you are getting the dry hop character of those hops.
4) You repeat this process until you have enough dry hop character.
I don’t see how adding multiple small rounds of dry hops to the same vessel at different times would increase hop aroma. I guess your theory is that you extract the hop character with the first half of the dry hops and then pour more on top that are in more contact with the beer, as they rest on top of the “old” dry hops? Seems like it’s better to add a charge of dry hops to the primary, then rack to a second carboy or keg with more dry hops in it.
Also, it would be interesting to see how mixing the carboy impacts it. I usually invert my dry-hop carboy every day or every few days to stir up the hops. You would obviously only do this if you racked off of the yeast to a second storage vessel. This is my way to sort of emulate the method of mixing the dry hops by bubbling CO2 through them (what some big brewers do to mix up the hops I’ve heard.)
I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that gelatin can bind with hop oils and diminish hop aroma, so I always skip fining my hoppy beers. Somebody really ought to test that theory out… 😉
Somebody has!
https://brulosophy.com/2015/01/05/the-gelatin-effect-exbeeriment-results/
In the book – “for the love of Hops”, page 201, you can read about a similar test that was conducted amongst 35 Rock Bottom breweries, all making the same beer. Variations to the time and manner of the all hop additions, including the final hop additions as well as dry.
34 experienced tasters participated and used 7 character components to compile the results. Bear in mind that this study included boil hops and dry hops, rather than strictly dry. Nonetheless, the results are worth noting.
Longer post boil residence resulted in more hop flavor, aroma, and perceived bitterness than shorter.
Longer post-boil residence resulted in more hop flavor than dry hopping indicating that hop flavor is best developed in the kettle.
There is no apparent relationship between measured bitterness and hop flavor or aroma, but significant correlations between perceived bitterness and hop flavor or aroma, which begs the question – does the method of measuring IBU’s really matter?
The combination of late hopping and dry hopping resulted in greater hop aroma than longer late wet hopping, however it appeared there was a diminishing return for additional quantities used in dry hopping.
This is great, thanks Rex! I’m a bit behind in my reading, I really need to get to that book, which rests squarely between a couple Dr.Seuss books on my nightstand at the moment ????
I think this is another case of “homebrewers don’t need to do things like professional brewers.” My understanding is that the double dry hop technique started because of the scale/geometry of 100+ barrel tanks caused the dry hops to form layers of hop where there was no contact with the beer; after a certain amount there was literally no extra benefit to adding more hops. To get around this brewers would add N sets of dry hops (where N > 1): one after the last addition added everything it could so if there was an inner layer it didn’t matter.
The geometry of homebrew sized vessels, however, doesn’t have this problem (or only manifests itself with *waaaaay* more hops than folks would use).
tl;dr homebrewers don’t need to worry about double dry hopping 🙂
Unfortunately, your original followup comment only added to my hilarity.
I admit to not being a hophead either. Never been into hoppy beers for my own reasons. But the few times I’ve made an IPA, I’ve tried different hopping schedules. To be honest, Ive never noticed a difference between a single, double, or even a triple dry-hopping schedule. IMHO our homebrewing is on too small a scale to have any kind of noticeable difference in the finished product.
This was a particularly timely post as tonight I’m dry hopping my latest IPA. I was going to do a double addition…but now I’m not.
Thanks for saving me a bit of labour!
Bryan
Thoroughly enjoyed this read. But you answered 1 question from dozens about hop flavor and aroma. The simplest being is there diminishing returns on dry hopping? How long will the dry hop aroma last? And is that time dependent on the amount of hops used at the dry hop? Can I get great aroma without using dry hop? And more!
What was the outcome of the “head to head” clone of the House of Pendragon Lancelot IPA? Where is the recipe?
I was asked not to share the recipe at this time. The outcome: they were all close, though the original beat all of our homebrew attempts. I think this has a lot to do with process differences, as Tommy does a 30 min whirlpool while knocking out because of his volume… some of us (ahem, I) was too impatient and didn’t think the extra 15 minutes would make that big of a difference. It did.
Interesting xBmnt, thanks again!
I started double-dry hopping when I switched over to using a 14gal conical. It seemed like I wasn’t getting the same dry hop potency in my IPA’s than I remembered from batches dry hopped in carboy’s. My only theory on this was that the big 5oz dose of dry hops was getting piled up on itself in the bottom of the cone and reducing the surface area contact with the beer. I typically only keep beer on the hops for about 4 days so I tried cutting the dose in half and dry hopping twice (2-3 days apart) and that that seems to have helped quite a bit. I haven’t done any quanitative testing of this, but I do believe that how you manage hop/beer contact area can have an effect. With carboys, I would get noticeably more dry hop aroma when I added the pellets directly to the beer and let them naturally settle in a layer on the bottom rather than using weighted hop-bags.
This is great! Ok I’ll just stick to single dry hopping. Do you think you could do an experiment using hop teas vs dry hopping? That’d be an interesting one mostly since after hop teas you can reuse the hops for bittering the next time thus increasing hop efficiency.
I’m not totally convinced double dry hopping makes no difference, just that in this xBmt tasters weren’t reliably able to distinguish the difference between samples.
Interesting xBmt idea, noted!
If professional beer tasters and cicerones couldn’t tell the difference, then for all intents and purposes, there is no difference.
One thing to note however is that many breweries that employ heavy double-dry hopping also add 1.5x+ the amount of hops that single-dry hop breweries add. So in that case, there will definitely be a difference.
I thought the point of double dry hopping was not just to use two dry hop additions, but to double the amount of dry hops used. I have a split batch going now, and will use a single 1.5 oz. addition to one vessel, and two 1.5 oz. additions to the other.
As always, thanks for sharing the process, the evaluation, and the deep thoughts!
I think it would be really hard to tell a difference. I usually do a single 12 oz dry hop addition for my NEIPAs, and I doubt 6 and 6 would make any difference. I DO swirl the carboy and the hop slowly drop into the beer more and more over a week or so.
NEIPAs might have a case for a double dry hop. If the first addition was added during active fermentation then biotransformation could take place, giving one set of flavors and aromas. Then if the second set of hops was added post fermentation you could get a whole different flavor and armor contribution. So instead of just doubling up on the flavor and aroma (which this exbeeriment shows doesn’t do much) you could get a beer with additional hop flavor and aroma.
https://brulosophy.com/2017/01/23/biotransformation-vs-standard-dry-hop-exbeeriment-results/
It’s most likely the methods. You probably hit dry hop saturation with the dry hop amounts.
Now that it’s many years later and NEIPAs are a big deal, the first dry hop charge is understood to be used for biotransformation. My question now is – does removing or leaving the biotransformation charge in make a difference. My gut tells me yes.
I think you should take a look at this again. Don’t just divvy up the hops, but increase the total amount used. Think about using secondary vs. primary for dry hopping, too. There would (appear to) be little chemical justification for a change in flavor/aroma when you’re using the same ingredients and technique, just waiting a few days for the second half. Then you have a “DDH method 1” vs “DDH method 2” knowing that your current method 1 (above) had zero difference vs. regular dry hopping.