Experiment: Early-fermentation Dry Hopping for Clarity

Background

Though there are other sources of haze in beer, yeast-derived haze can be a substantial, style-satisfying one on its own. How much haze manifests from the yeast-determining factor in your beer has, first: a lot to do with a strain’s potential for haze ability (that trait is related to its haze gene), next: how that strain interacts with elements of the dry hop. The timing of a dry hop addition has probably the most dramatic effect on how much haze will show up from healthy yeast, though other dry hop factors influence things, too. When you are dry hopping and your goal is clarity, early-fermentation dry hop timing is what you want (surprisingly, this is true for both haze-positive and haze neutral strains. A haze-neutral strain’s haze-contributing potential is always very low, but can be made even lower with early dry hop timing; and a haze-positive strain’s large potential for haze can be minimized with early-fermentation dry hop timing). 

But, there’s more. When you happen to be using a haze-positive strain yet you want a bright outcome, a small, extra dry hop charge at the beginning of fermentation can clear up yeast-determined haze even when there is also a later dry hop. The early dry hop charge has a dominant effect. The following experiment illustrates the phenomenon in action: just .5 lb/bbl of an early dry hop charge changed this beer from hazy to bright (pictured above).

The Experiment

See Omega Yeast’s R&D Director, explain the evolution of the team’s research on yeast and haze in this video presentation for the 2024 Ohio Brewers Conference.