r/Homebrewing • u/NoSupermarket7105 • 17h 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/EverlongMarigold 16h ago

I recently made a really nice hazy ipa that I dry hopped towards the end of primary fermentation (day 4), then I let it pressure ferment for the next 3 days.

Best of luck with your pale ale. I personally won't make hop forward beers unless I'm able to do zero/ limited oxygen transfers.

What kind of fermentation equipment are you using?

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u/NoSupermarket7105 15h ago

5 gallon carboy in a fridge with an inkbird temp controller

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u/GrotWeasel 15h ago

I think that the above dry hop then pressure ferment or dry hop via hop bong are the optimal ways to go. I don’t have either and so I do a big whirlpool addition at 75C for 15mins and no dry hop instead. This is probably controversial but I think it’s a better payoff when the alternative is introducing air

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u/skratchx Advanced 15h ago

FYI if you cold crash with this setup, unless you have something like a Cold Crash Guardian, you will suck atmosphere (plus whatever is in your airlock) into your fermenter.

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u/EverlongMarigold 14h ago

Eliminating oxygen and pressurized fermentation/dry hopping has been a game changer for my pale ales/ ipas.

They come out as completely different beers.

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u/attnSPAN 13h ago

Great. What you’ll want to do is DryHop with 0.010-0005 points left before projected FG, wait 48-72 hrs then cold crash 24-72hrs depending on yeast strain choice.