Whirlpooling in the Home Brewery

Adding post-boil hot-side hops to a batch of homebrew is comparatively simple.

The smaller batch sizes and hop doses minimize many of the challenges of whirlpool additions at the commercial scale. Of course, you probably don’t have a dedicated whirlpool vessel in your garage brewery, but here are three options for boosting the aroma of your custom IPAS.

Whirlpool in the Kettle

If you use an immersion counterflow chiller in your brew kettle, you can add a hop dose while your wort is cooling. It’s a time-tested method for homebrewers to add big charges of flavor- and aromaboosting hops, but Sam Richardson from Other Half suggests using a mesh bag or some other way to contain the hop particles, lest you have a messy slurry to deal with alongside decreased wort yields.

Use a Hopback

You could repurpose a carboy or other vessel as a hopback between the kettle and your fermentation vessel (or make your own hopback—see “DIY: Make Your Own Hopback,” beerandbrewing.com). You’ll also need a pump to move the hot wort and a way to chill the liquid in the kettle to your target temperature

(try about 180°F/82°C to start). Just add your dose of late hops to the hopback and rack the wort onto the hops. Give it between 45 and 60 minutes of contact time, then rerack the wort into your fermentor. Be mindful of wort temperature when you pitch your yeast though—it might be necessary to rack to an intermediate vessel with an immersion chiller to further cool the wort.

Try the Dip Hop

Oregon’s Gigantic Brewing uses a technique called “dip hopping” when they want to focus on the more delicate volatiles in the hops or when they want to minimize additional bitterness via isomerization. The hardest part about adapting the process to the homebrew scale is the math, but for a 5-gallon (19-liter) batch, it works out to about 2 oz (57 g) of hops steeped in 20 fl oz (591 ml) of hot water.

Begin by loading your late-hop addition into your empty fermentation vessel. Purge the fermentor with CO2, if possible, then add hot liquor at a target extraction temperature of 150–170°F (66–77°C). Let the hops steep for about an hour before you add the cooled wort and pitch the yeast. Make sure to adjust your gravity calculations to account for the extra liquid, watch your sanitization practices, and be careful to minimize oxygen pickup from splashing water or wort.