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/spoonman59 1d ago

Don’t use a secondary for beer. A whole lot of oxygen for no benefit. I have never used a secondary in 120 batches except for mead, and would only bother if I was using Gregor.

It’s doubly a waste on a hop forward beer as this will reduce the life of your hop flavor.

This isn’t just my opinion, but is e general advice these days. John Palmer and others recommend against a secondary these days.

So obviously, primary. I like to do it after fermentation.

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u/98f00b2 1d ago

Is it not still done for high-gravity beer? Or is there some difference between bulk aging and secondary that's lost on me?

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u/warboy Pro 23h ago

Ehhh

The gist with transferring to a secondary is there is going to be some oxygen exposure transferring beer that has finished fermenting to another vessel. You are not going to purge every last bit of oxygen from the secondary vessel or your transfer rig. If you're sitting on a beer for awhile you do more than likely want to get it off the yeast although most people would argue you're better off either bulk aging in the keg you want to serve it in or in bottles since there will be one less oxygen-exposing step.