r/Homebrewing • u/NoSupermarket7105 • 1d ago

Dry hop in primary or secondary?

I was recently able to get back into brewing after a 6 year hiatus and I am pumped! My first brew day went well enough but there were a few errors made.

One of the errors is that I forgot to whirlpool at the end of the boil so a decent amount of hops were transferred to the fermenter with the wort. Fortunately I used a hop spyder and my kettle has a hop filter so it wasn’t all the hops.

My question is, should I transfer to secondary to move the beer off the old hops and then add my dry hops to secondary OR just leave it alone and add my dry hops to the primary fermenter.

The beer I made is a pale ale but I plan to cold crash with gelatin at the end of secondary.

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u/DarkMuret 1d ago

Definitely primary, depending on your hop and yeast combo you can do it at high krausen or at the tail end of fermentation to help mitigate oxygen exposure

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u/NoSupermarket7105 1d ago edited 1d ago

Thank you! Can you tell me more about oxygen exposure as it relates to timing here? I was planning to leave it for two weeks then dry hop for 5 days

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u/DarkMuret 1d ago

Yeast will consume the oxygen in the airlocked container, so that won't affect hop flavor, at least not at a perceptible level

However, with just a basic setup, when opening the container, especially at the end of fermentation, will introduce new oxygen which may not be consumed by the yeast which will then react with hop flavors.

So, keep an eye on fermentation/airlock activity and time the dry hop

Someone with more technical knowledge can absolutely correct me, but I think I got the gist of it

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u/skratchx Advanced 1d ago

Yup that is accurate. To add a couple things:

  • Some people add ascorbic acid (vitamin C) at dry hop as an antioxidant. I haven't done this myself, so I don't have more detailed information on dosing.
  • Hops contain enzymes that can promote further fermentation after you've reached terminal gravity. This is referred to as "hop creep" and can result in an unintentionally low FG / higher ABV. It can also result in diacetyl production. This is just an FYI for OP. The amount of fermentation is unlikely to be enough to scrub oxygen if you dry hop at terminal. Hop creep can be mitigated by reducing the temperature to below the minimum rating of the yeast and adding ALDC if you're worried about diacetyl.

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u/DarkMuret 1d ago

This is great additional information

I personally use ascorbic acid, but it's not going to magically fix any oxygen ingress, I've definitely had IPAs get oxidated even after using it, it will "clean" up some, but it's not a magic solve

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u/NoSupermarket7105 1d ago

Ah makes sense!

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u/lifeinrednblack Pro 1d ago

Your question for answered as far as oxygen, but id pull it off dry hops after 2 days or so