dryhopping w/secondary

[hopheaddude]

I have a barleywine that has been fermenting in the primary for 2 weeks that I am about to rack to the secondary.. my question is I plan on pitching a small amount of yeast in the secondary, I'm wondering if dry-hopping with hop plugs at the same time would cause problems in the in the way of bacterial infection or other possible off flavors?

[ray m]

Welcome, hophead......I have dry-hopped 3 beers in my "career" and never had a problem with infections, etc. And these beers were just regular strength (@ 5.5%). If your brewing a barleywine, you certainly have more than enough alcohol in that brew to keep anything well at bay----don't worry about it.

Drink hearty, y'all!!!!

Ray

[sullydavid]

While hops are nice because they have those great tasting properties, one of the main reasons they were used at first was because they have anti-bacterial properties also. There were many other things that could be used to make a beer bitter, but bittering along with the anti-bacterial prooperties made them an ideal match.

Never say never, but I would not be concerned at all dry hopping. I have never had a problem.

[hopheaddude]

thanks for the response.. my second question is when bottling I usually prime with a half to three quarters of a cup of corn sugar, if I were to pitch yeast again before bottling along with my usual priming corn sugar could I have a problem with exploding bottles? I'm sure I'll have to reduce the amount of priming sugar but I wonder how much. I've read that barleywines sometimes have trouble with carbonation and was hoping to avoid this problem while letting the barleywine age with a new addition of yeast.

[sullydavid]

I wouldn't think that you would have a problem. My assumption is that the amount of yeast is not really a cause of exploding bottles. That would be more of an issue of too much sugar. The thought of adding the extra yeast for this type of beer is because so much of the yeast has probably already dropped out of suspension. Adding the yeast will just make it carbonate faster, but not extra carbonation.

[Fast_Eddy]

Why not just rouse the yeast instead of pitching again?

[BucksBrew]

I only dry hopped once. But when I did, I sanitized my hands as well as the nylon bag the hops were in.

I also added a sterilized marble to keep the Hops down in the beer! my$.02