Dry Hopping Beer with Michael Tonsmeire – BeerSmith Podcast #324
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Michael Tonsmeyer joins me this week to discuss dry hopping. This is Beersmith Podcast number 324.

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This is Beersmith Podcast number 324, and it's late April 2025. Michael Tonsmeyer joins me this week to discuss dry hopping. Thank you to this week's sponsors, Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They recently added a collection of more than 500 beer recipes from pro brewers to their site, and most let you download the Beersmith recipe file. The new Craft Beer and Brewing recipe site is at beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes. Again, that site is beerandbrewing.com slash beer and brewing.

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And finally, a reminder to click that like and subscribe button on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, or whatever platform you're listening on. Clicking those buttons is a great way to support the show. And now let's jump into this week's episode. Today on the show, I welcome back Michael Tonsmeire. Michael is the author of the book Sour Beers, as well as the author of the blog The Mad Fermentationist. Michael is also an award-winning brewer, certified beer judge, and founder of the brewery Sapwood Cellars in Columbia, Maryland.

Michael, how are you doing today? How are things going? Good. It's great to be on. Thanks for inviting me. My pleasure. How are things going at Sapwood Cellars? I think you're doing some expansion right now, right? Yeah, we've been in the process of a modest expansion for the last two and a half or three years now. We took over a little bit of space next to us, and we're adding a kitchen. It's going to be called Albuera Taqueria. So Albuera is just Spanish for Sapwood.

And we're sort of doing the same thing we do for beer, sort of taking inspiration from sort of classic stuff, but then updating, modernizing, localizing, doing sort of fun, unique twists on things. So we'll have sort of some traditional tacos, but we're also doing a whole bunch of, you know, beef bulgogi tacos and a whole bunch of vegetarian options because my partner, Scott Janisch, is vegan.

Yeah, I think he's, isn't he the one that set up the restaurant? I've been, I've been exchanging emails with him. Yeah, he is just absolutely, you know, working seven days a week. He was in there, I think, Sunday night into early Monday morning, knocking down a temporary wall for the tasting room expansion. And he's using his truck to haul around, you know, demolition stuff and all sorts of stuff. He is really, um,

uh, wet, taking a little bit of a step back from the beer side of things and, and let me run wild. So he can really focus on getting this, this thing off the ground. That's cool. Um, so your tasting room has been in Columbia Marathon sometime, uh, is a restaurant, same location or. Yeah. So we're, we're, our GM Spencer, uh, has been coaching me not to call it a restaurant, to call it a kitchen. So it's a, a kitchen at the current location. Um,

We're really hoping to sort of appeal to people who maybe are not our current beer nerd, beer aficionado sort of people. We're really looking hopefully to bring in folks who are just looking to try some food. And sure, if there's local beer, they'd love to have some, but they're probably not the kind of people who are un-untapped or looking through the recent winners of brewing awards or Googling breweries near me, that kind of thing. So the goal is just to have a place that is

Sort of a community space and sort of has a whole different group of people who are excited to come in and hang out because at this point we're sort of, I think, have reached peak saturation on beer and beer nerds and breweries. What is going on on the beer side? I'm sure you're still brewing some new beers. Constantly. We, I think, just crossed over our thousandth different beer that we've brewed in our six and a half years, which is absolutely wild.

No, we're sort of doing all the same stuff. We do mostly IPAs, double IPAs, triple IPAs. We're doing a lot of West Coast Pilsners, which I've really been enjoying, just sort of taking a sort of classic Pilsner recipe and then dry hopping it with sort of typically American hops rather than the classic European varieties. And still doing a lot of fun, mixed firm, sour beers, even though that's not the thing that's driving sales anymore. But I love them. I'm going to keep doing them until I get kicked out.

That's awesome. Yeah. We're actually closing a beersmithrecipes.com, the recipe site, closing on 2 million recipes.

Which is pretty cool if you think about it. I mean, that's a lot of recipes for beer. Yeah, we've got about 930 of them. I'll be talking to you pretty soon about an expansion. We can take care of that. That's not a problem. Anyways, today you wanted to talk about dry hopping. And, you know, we tend to associate dry hopping with IPAs and a lot of the modern American beers. But dry hopping has been used for a long time for a wide variety of styles. Why is dry hopping so important for the modern brewer?

Sure. I really love dry hop beers. I think I've just gotten used to what a really fresh hoppy beer tastes like. And when I think about having a Hefeweizen and the entire character is traditionally sort of yeast-driven...

I really think a little extra hop oomph is a fun way to put a twist on that style. And that can be something. I mean, there are definitely, we make a double IPA that has a little bit of Hefeweizen yeast blended in, all cashmere, but it's really a double IPA. On a traditional Hefeweizen, I might not dry hop it, but I definitely would sort of amp up the Whirlpool edition, maybe some Saphir, maybe some Tetanang, something that's going to have a little citrusy note.

But if you really want something that's going to pop or be unique or more aromatic for you, if you mostly drink IPAs or for if you're a commercial brewer, you know, sort of the beer drinker who is used to drinking IPAs, adding a small dry hop charge really can brighten it, enliven it, give you a unique character that you're just never going to get from a beer that's six months old. And for a lot of people, that's something they will say, this is a better, specialer

more vibrant, more unique example of the style. Obviously, you can go too far with that, but if you're a home brewer, adding a half an ounce or an ounce of a dry hop to a traditionally non-dry hopped beer is a really nice way to add depth and complexity without maybe totally overwhelming the beer like you would with an IPA or double IPA where the dry hop is the driving character of that beer. Yeah, I'm going to see what you're talking about. Just punching up the aroma a little bit, right?

Yeah, and without sort of the risk of adding more stringency that you might get from adding a heavy whirlpool addition or too much bitterness or something like that.

To me, there's always, there are a lot of compounds in hops that just don't translate. No matter how much you add to the whirlpool or a five-minute addition or a hop stand or whatever, the myrosine, a lot of these sort of more volatile compounds will just be blown off by heat and then scrubbed out by fermentation. And that can be a positive thing. I mean, that's some of those more durable compounds are what is traditional in a Pilsner, what is traditional in a lot of English ales.

But for me, there's something really fun about having that brighter, fresher sort of character in those classic styles. Cool. Now, when we talk about dry hopping, obviously selecting the right hops for aroma is key. How do you go about evaluating and selecting hops for dry hop? Sure. As one of the big advantages we have as a commercial professional brewery is that we get to select hops.

For American hops, that means going out to Yakima in the fall, getting to smell four, five, six lots of a given variety. We get to select both a lot for pellets, T90s, Simcoe Citra Mosaic, a couple others. We also, the Yakima Chief is nice enough to let us select for cryo. So we get to pick a different lot that gets turned into cryo for us. We're small enough that we are really sort of picking up the tail ends

If a brewery, say, wants to select 4,000 pounds of Citra and the lot happens to be 4,400 pounds of Citra, we get to come in and smell everybody's leftovers. But I've always wanted to know who got the rest of it. They refuse to tell anyone. I would imagine.

Yeah, we go into the room. In America, because the hops haven't been processed yet, the bigger breweries get to choose. Do they want them blended? Do they want this to be cryo or that to be pellets? You get to smell the whole hops. So you get the whole cone hops.

We just rub them between our hands, we smell them. I've always found that just getting your hands on the hops, whether it's whole hops, whether it's pellets, really feeling the texture of those hops, really breaking down those oils, warming them up in your hands is a really great way to sort of figure out if you like the aroma or not.

As a home brewer, I used to just sort of open the bag and smell it. And I've really learned sort of through doing this for the last few years. When I do that, that's a less accurate picture of what the hops really smell like, what they're really going to give to the beer. I was talking to Mitch Steele at New Realm, and he was saying that he's a big believer in making hop teas. And that's something I've really never got into, but the ASBC has a great detailed list

process where you mix the hops with room temperature water in a, just a French press. And so you mix them together, you stir it, you let sit for a little while, press them, and then that's going to extract compounds in a different way than just rubbing. You know, you really will see what is water soluble, which in the end of the day is really what's important. So much of the hop itself is not going to dissolve or be transferred into the beer and

And even a high alcohol beer is still 90% water. And so doing in water or maybe even better yet, if your beer is done fermenting, take a little of that word off of a sample valve and mix it with the hops, let them sit in a French press.

stir it up, press it, and then, you know, smell that beer with either two or three different varieties. Or if you happen to buy hops from a couple of different shops or a couple of different online stores, you can really try that beer, get that preview in context with how are those aromatics going to come together with the yeast character, with the

the other hops are already in there from the hot side or maybe from the first dry hop addition. And so there's a lot of really different and great options on evaluating the hops that you have. But really I'd say like,

Part of being a great brewer is being a good editor. And if a hop doesn't smell right, particularly for dry hopping, I wouldn't use it. We'll reseal bags and we'll put them back in the cooler. And those become Whirlpool editions because a lot of the mediocre, iffy, not quite perfect Aramax just blow off again. And so we'll use good hops for Whirlpool. We'll use great hops for dry hopping. Well,

Well, I mean, that's an important point because a lot of homebrewers just open the package and dump it in, you know, and that's usually not a great idea. You really need to sample your hops before they go into your beer. Yeah. Real quick, can you cover, I know you covered the hop tea thing, but can you cover the sort of how you might do a dry rub with pellets?

Sure. I think it's really important to just break the pellets down as much as you possibly can. So it's really, it's putting, it doesn't have to be much. It can just be three or four or five pellets and put them between your two palms. And you want to rub those hops until you've made a really fine powder.

If you find that annoying or you don't want to deal with that, I think the hop tea method even calls for just pureeing them in a blender or a food processor. So if you've got maybe a little, and I probably wouldn't use it for coffee after using it perhaps, but just a little blade grinder that you might use for coffee or spices, buzz them up.

And that, you know, will really break them down fully and you'll really be able to get to smell them. Yeah, I mean, I used to just crush them up with a spoon or something so you get it as fine a powder as you could, you know, and then you get it up in your hands. Yeah. And honestly, you'll learn, I kind of like, I like the tactile sensation of rubbing them between my hands because you'll also learn what the texture of those pellets are. And if they're really hard little rocks and you're rubbing and rubbing and they're still just little ball bearings between your hands,

you know maybe you'll have to be a little bit more aggressive in rousing those hops back into solution because if you add them to a fermenter, they may just sink right to the bottom and really not extract well versus a hop that's a fluffy, light, powdery, minimal compression. Those may sink and rain down through your beard, really not need much additional agitation to extract. Sure.

And what do you do? I think you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but what do you do if you buy some hops that really don't measure up in terms of aroma and flavor, especially for a home brewer?

Yeah, we have a couple of different sort of, let's say, thresholds. So there are some hops that honestly, I don't think that they smell that great, even when they're really good. I'm not a big believer in Idaho 7 as a dry hop. Interesting. We've tried it three or four times. It just never translates, but it is, for us, the best whirlpool hop. It can be too much. It has this very particular...

I'd say rotten pineapple sort of thing that for me has become a marker of hops that do well in the whirlpool, but it must be some compound that just for whatever reason just doesn't translate to dry hopping. So again, if it's a hop that just isn't a wow, reseal it, whirlpool, maybe one step down from that is maybe we use it for bittering. It's a hop that I won't say is awful, but just has some real serious character flaws.

Hey, you know, if I'm hanging, if I need an extra 10 IBUs at the start of a stout or something like that, I've got no problem tossing something like that in at 60 minutes or 90 minutes. Fine. There are definitely hops that as a sour beer brewery that will age intentionally. That tends to be the more lower alpha stuff. So,

For example, we do an English Summer Ale every year that's some combination of Styrian Goldings, US Goldings, East Kent Goldings, generic English Goldings, whatever it is. I'll order just three or four bags of 2024 Goldings. We'll smell them all on brew day. We'll take a look at the alpha acids. We'll piece together what we think the best hops are will be Whirlpool hops.

The okay hops, they're maybe a little higher alpha, might be a little bit earlier in the boil. And then the rest of those hops probably end up on, we have just a palette of hops that are aging for four, five, seven, nine, whatever years, until eventually they smell sort of like dried hay and

are not offensive, but also are just sort of most of their character is gone. So, I mean, do you intentionally stale the hops like they do with a lot of some of the Belgian, I don't know, Lambics and so on? Yeah, no, so exactly. It's just, we'll also, like if there's another local brewery that says, hey, we've got, you know, we just found the back of our cooler. We got this Celia from 2017. Do you guys want it?

or a local hop supplier knows that we want and they'll sell us stuff for a buck a pound that's a few years old. And so again, I wouldn't probably buy 10 or $12 a pound fresh hops with that intent.

But it's a backup plan so that I can order more hops than I need for a particular beer and do my own selection there and smell the hops and use the best hops for that English Summer Ale and save the stuff that's okay or meh or, oh boy, that bag got punctured accidentally and now the hops are a little bit oxidized. Give them some potential value.

Well, dry hopping carries some risks associated with it, and one of those certainly is oxygen. And I know you mentioned in your article that you wrote oxygen can be a real problem. What are some of the things you can do to help minimize the oxygen, particularly when reducing, you know, dry hops into your fermenter? Yeah, no, that's really, I think it's one of the biggest places where homebrewed IPA goes wrong.

Scott and I, our brewers, are not necessarily fond of the hoops that we have them jump through to eliminate oxygen. Because when you're talking about commercial beer, you're talking about parts per billion. A billion is a very big number. And trying to make...

the amount of oxygen in that beer under 20, say 20 ppb, 20 parts per billion at packaging is, it's tough, particularly because there's oxygen often that's compressed down into the pellets. There is

I mean, that level's similar to, I believe, what some of the big brewers produced, right? Yeah, no, and that's the goal. And they're often, I mean, once you start trying to hit those numbers with filtration, with a centrifuge, it gets even harder. We tend to do a lot of unit tanking, and so our risk points are a lot smaller, but also we're big believers in doing everything we possibly can.

So the way we sort of generally dry hop is to, the company actually just announced they're going to have a business, it's a company called Merck's that makes hop dosers. And so the idea is that we have a big valve on the top of our tank, we put the hops into just this metal container,

We close it, and then we purge it with CO2. We pressurize it with CO2 to 15 PSI 10 times, blowing down up to 15, blowing down. And then we open that big valve on the tank, and that allows us to essentially have an airlock.

for lack of a better phrasing, where the hops are in there, they're purged of any oxygen, and then they're dropped into the beer. That allows us also to drop hops in after the beer is partially carbonated, after the beer has been spunded, anything like that. As a home brewer, I would just count on the continued fermentation, the active fermentation

during the last one or two Play-Doh of fermentation to scrub in the oxygen. So, I mean, you're suggesting add the hops just a little bit earlier than you probably normally would, right? Yeah, and you're going to lose some hop character the more active fermentation you have. Again, it's like adding hops to the whirlpool. You're having CO2 generated. That CO2 is allowed to exit. It's going to carry up those aromatics up and out. And when you dry hop a beer during fermentation, it smells great.

And that's the problem is that those great aromatics that you're trying to infuse into the beer are coming up and out of the airlock and you're smelling them. And so I would do a two-step process at home. I do about half my hops as pellets, warm in the fermenter as that Krausen was starting to die down.

I'd let fermentation finish. Those hops will settle out with the yeast. Again, might cause trouble if you're trying to reuse the yeast. Now you've got hops mixed in with it. And then I would go into a keg. And I'd sort of do the same process we do now with the hops.

in reverse, for lack of a better phrasing. So I would put the hops into the keg, I purge the keg with CO2, and then I would transfer in the beer into that purge keg with the hops already in it. So in that case, I would usually do whole hops. I would usually have them in like a canister screen that you can buy online, sort of mesh screen, and that way the hops are contained. They're not going to come out of that and clog up your dip tube or cause any other trouble.

And I'm a big believer in dry hopping cold. That was something that Scott had pushed for a long time. That's what the science says, that a lot of those fruity compounds come out just as quickly or nearly as quickly at 40 as they do at 70. But what comes out a lot slower are the polyphenols, the harsher compounds. That was actually my next topic is what temperature is ideal for dry hopping.

Like a lot of things in brewing, you ask 10 brewers and there's 10 or more answers. I...

I have a huge amount of respect for the folks at a lot of other great breweries and everybody's got a different process. Some places drop in their hops when the beer is warm and don't do anything else. Some of them rouse their beer seven or eight times warm. Some of them, I think we're probably colder than most people. We do an initial dry hop around 50, 55, something like that. And then we do a final dry hop pretty close to freezing.

- Wow. - And that's worked for us. Well, I'm a big believer in drinking my beer next to other great examples, and I kept finding our beers had a harshness to them, a lingering, not a hot burn, which I think of as in the throat, more that sort of harshness. This is like a tannic, over-extracted black tea kind of thing where it would stick to my tongue.

As we brought the temperature down, I noticed that less and less. The problem was I also noticed the hop aromatics less and less. And so we had just been sort of rousing the hops by hooking up CO2 at the bottom of the tank, running sort of a blast, closing it, running another second, closing it, just trying to get a burp, a blast that would sort of stir the hops up.

And we had a beer that was all cryo hops. It was, I think it was six or seven pounds per barrel, which is just, I mean, like a pound in five gallons and all cryo. And we burped it two or three times over a couple of days. And then I went to drop the hops out of the cone and whole pellets were coming out.

And I just went nuts to this and I just hooked up CO2 and I turned it on for about two minutes and I pulled the sample off the sample valve and sure enough, it was hop soup, you know, looked like confetti in there. And so, we've been slowly becoming more and more aggressive with our rousing. We've played around with pumps, we've played around with… So, what do you think the rousing is doing in this case? Is it actually helping…

extract more aroma out of the hops, for example? Yeah. So, I believe, Scott's a chemistry guy. I'm a physics guy. I'm a big believer in to get extraction from something, it needs to be up in solution. If all the hops, as a home brewer, your hops in a bucket might be sitting in, say, a quarter-inch layer at the bottom of a flat bucket,

As a commercial brewery trying to add 44 or 88 pounds of hops to a tank that has a cone at the bottom, my hops are probably ending up as just a big three foot thick wad of hops at the bottom. And there's very little interaction between that beer layer and that hop layer if it's all at the bottom.

And so what we're really trying to do is get those hops back up into suspension or with a pump, keep them in suspension so that there's more time. There's just more molecules bumping into each other. There's more chance for a lot of those compounds that are not, um,

water loving. There are compounds that like will dissolve into water, but, um, need some help. Um, and so that's, that's something where most aromatics are aromatic because they don't like dissolving in solution really. Right. Exactly. And alcohol is a, is a really fantastic solvent, but beer is again, only six, seven, 8% alcohol. So it's really not, um,

an especially effective extractant for a lot of those compounds. And so that's something again, like a lot of hop companies are now moving towards extract where they are pre-dissolving hop compounds into propylene glycol or into ethanol or something else, doing that hard work for you and saying, Hey, you can use a much smaller amount and still get similar results. I, I'm a big believer that like, I,

I love extracts and we play around with them a lot, but the real hops you're getting a lot more than just fractionalized, selected aromatics. You're getting that whole breadth of compounds. Well, the next question obviously is what's the appropriate dosage rate? I know people are all over the map again on this. What's the appropriate dosage rate for dry hopping?

Sure. I mean, like anything, you know, what's the appropriate amount of malt? I think it really depends on what you're trying to achieve. For us, we started at, say, and maybe you're better at this than me, but my rule of thumb, I think, is that, what is it?

Half the pounds per barrel is ounces per gallon because a barrel is 31 gallons and two pounds is 32 ounces. So we used to be two pounds per barrel for a pale ale, which would be like one ounce per gallon. That sounds about right. Which is pretty sizable. We're higher than that now. Our IPAs used to be one and a half ounces per gallon. Our double IPAs used to be two ounces per gallon.

Now, a lot of the double IPAs are two or three ounces per gallon, and half of that's cryo, and we're adding some oil on top of that. Well, I know the hazies go even worse, right? Yeah. Even higher. Your true colors are coming out, Brad. Even worse.

No, but exactly. We really want those beers to be wow aromas. And for me, that's picking great hops. It's adding a lot of hops over a couple of editions. So we're often two or three equally spaced editions.

And then just making sure your varieties work and play well together. I'm a big believer in two, maybe three hop varieties for dry hopping a single beer. A lot of people will say like, oh, all hazy IPAs taste the same.

And the truth is that a lot of the big producers are using five or six different hop varieties as a way to make a consistent product year to year. Hop varieties, lot to lot change. If you use a whole bunch of different varieties, if one of them really shifts or you can't get access to one of them anymore, you're still going to have something that's pretty similar compared to if you have a beer that's

100% Nelson Savin or 100% Galaxy. Sure, sure. And so for me, two varieties is sort of the sweet spot usually where you're, if one's got a little of this and one's got a little of that, they sort of balance each other out. But it's a way to avoid having all your beers taste the same. We put out a lot of IPAs and double IPAs. I want, if somebody has two of them next to each other, say,

Wow, this one with Nelson, really, maybe I can't put my finger in, whether it's gooseberry or Sauvignon Blanc or rhubarb, but there's something distinct there that I don't get in this other one that's more citrusy and fruity.

And that's, I think, hopefully what keeps IPA vibrant. It's why people keep making IPAs and people keep searching out IPAs. And you don't maybe have that same culture of people looking for Pilsners.

Because there's really fantastic pill series out there, but the best ones all kind of taste the same as each other. Where for IPAs, you can have three or four IPAs, they're all fantastic and have almost none of the same aromatics in common. And when you blend together a bunch of hops, each of which has a lot of the same compounds, just in different ratios, you're ending up with sort of an average profile rather than something that is pushed in one direction. Sure, sure.

Well, what about duration? You know, when I started brewing, we used to use very long dry hop durations. And now there's certainly been a move towards much shorter exposure times.

Yeah, and I think a lot of that is just these higher dry hopping rates that what you run into when you have really long contact, particularly warm, particularly with a lot of agitation, is green, vegetal, cabbagey. There's just a lot of plant material in there. Oh, sure.

And that just extracts to you're getting chlorophyll, you're getting the stuff that you maybe don't want because it's just not the bright, fruity, tropical, vibrant compounds. It's the cooked vegetal sort of thing.

And so for us, a lot of beers, it's 24 hours. We'll drop the hops in one day. We'll rouse them. We'll let them fall back down overnight. We'll rouse them back up again in the morning. And then by that second night, maybe a third of them have dropped out. We'll start dropping them out. And the next day, we'll drop more hops out. And the next day, we'll drop more hops out. And then we'll add another dose, trying to get as much of those

spent hops out as we can before the next dose goes in and they all get stirred up again together. I think probably two, three, four days is probably more common. But for us, at these really high dry hop rates, we're really trying to just get the best of the best aromatics out of it and not try to wring the last little bit of aroma out of the hops at the expense, the risk of

getting polyphenols, of getting these sort of other compounds we're not looking for. Yeah, I think most people settled on something like 24 to 72 hours kind of a thing. So commercial brewers often talk about double and triple hop beers. Is there really a big advantage to using multiple doses of hops? I know you mentioned you often multiple dose. And I mean, is a triple dry hop any better than a single? Well, I'll say that a lot of brewers, when they say double dry hop,

don't mean that it was hopped twice. They mean vaguely that this has doubled the amount of hops of a normal amount that we would add. Okay. In the same way that a double IPA isn't really double the alcohol of an IPA. It's a little bit more. For us, and I try when I talk about two-stage dry hopping, partly it is a...

It's just a volume game that it can be very hard to get good extraction when you have that much vegetative material all in there at once. And that splitting up into a couple of doses can help you to more thoroughly mix and thoroughly extract the hop aromatics, drop them out, and then add more. When we run a pump to recirculate, you can run into trouble if you have too much hop material in there. It'll actually start to gum up the pump, and the pellets will start causing trouble. Oh, sure.

there's a risk in that the green material in hops can actually strip out hop compounds that are already in solution. And so if you're doing three, four, five, six, there's a point at which you're really gonna get diminishing returns where a new dose of hops will just be taking back out as much aroma as it's putting in. And so for us, I tend to use those more concentrated products, whether it is Cryo, Lupomax, CGX,

Lupulin pellets, there are several different marking terms for essentially they've removed about half of the green material. So your alpha acid goes from 10% to 20%. Your total oil goes from one or 2% to three or 4%. And those I find work better at colder temperatures. They don't strip out as much as the pellets do. They're less likely to get vegetal because there's less of the green material.

And I think that they often have a bigger, bolder hop expression, hop extraction. They tend to be ground finer, and so they tend to be a little bit more powdery. They tend to stay in suspension longer, whereas a lot of pellets will fall out quicker. And so for me, that's worked.

As I understand it, a lot of these are variations of Luplin powder, right? Aren't they basically... And they're using, in many cases, different methods to extract the part. But the idea is they're trying to extract the brightest, sort of the most bitter portion of the hop cone, right? Yeah. And they're sold both...

Scott and I are not great targets. We just talked to all our sales reps and they always say, oh, you can use half as much and your yield will go up by 10%. And Scott and I just invariably said, well, what happens if we use the same amount that we would have otherwise? Do we get twice as much aroma? That's always sort of been what I want is I want more, better aroma, not less.

an extra barrel of beer. At the end of the day, I mean, there's 10,000 breweries in the country and we're lucky to be in a position where we don't have to be as price conscious as a big brewery that's trying to do distro and have beer on store shelves and make those margins.

But the sort of the other side is that we need to make beer that's unique enough and special enough. And that's marketing its flavor to get people to come to our brewery to drink it. And that means using more and more expensive ingredients because.

That's how we get there. And so for me, that's always been a, you know, how do I use these new products to create something special and unique and more potent, more powerful, more expressive? And I'm really a big fan of the Cryo in particular, I think is great. Some of the other ones are good, but really the question is like, why?

What's the variety? What's the extraction? Are they keeping it cold enough to not volatize? The higher the concentration of oil you have in the pellet, when you pelletize it, the temperature goes up faster, which then you're potentially losing aromatics because you're getting too hot. And so that's cryo is named because they're using liquid nitrogen to keep the equipment cool enough so that they can pelletize without flashing off these aromatics. Mm-hmm.

Well, let's talk about hop oil additives. There's a whole bunch of new ones now that can be added even at bottling. And some of them aren't even derived from hops. I know Abstracts makes a number of aroma oils that are very hop-like. They can duplicate aroma profiles for individual hops that in many cases aren't even made from hops.

Yeah, no, we're big fans of abstracts. Honestly, the thing I'm most fond of for abstracts, we're going to be sending them a lot of money soon, is that they, at even our scale, they'll take three boxes of your selected hops and they will run them through their process and extract your oils from your selected hops. And that, to me, so much oil you're essentially buying like a home brewer buying spot hops. You're buying...

a gallon of hop extract from Citra. What Citra? What lot was it? Where was it grown? How old was it? We don't know. And that's one of the, I think the really great things Abstracts is doing. And they ran a couple of small runs for us of Citra and Simcoe. And I was really impressed by them.

I'll say that they're non-hop derived, hop-like terpenes I don't care for particularly. They have that

um, weed pen for lack of a, a more delicate way to put it, a, a, um, artificial pot thing. Um, that a very low level, like I could imagine working. We added too much to a couple of beers and, the aroma is great, but it has this,

retro olfactory hop burl sort of thing that you don't notice until after you've had half a glass of it. So it did well. I didn't mention it. Abstracts actually has several different lines and many of them are hop derived too, but I just find it interesting that they're doing both. Oh, yeah.

Both sides there. And so, the line I really like is Quantum Bright. Sure. We also use their cannabis-derived ones. We sponsor a disc golf tournament and our disc golf brewer Joe pitched doing a mango pineapple express terpene beer.

And that's great. And so if you're looking to make the sort of crossover beer for the cannabis enjoyer, I think their cannabis terpenes are really fun and unique and potent. And I think their Quantum Bright stuff is a lot less like extract-y. There's just like an extract-y flavor in a lot of hop extracts. It says...

Once you've smelled a couple of them, this isn't what hops smell like. It's almost right, but there's something weird about it, something unique. A couple of our guys really can taste propylene glycol. And so a lot of the hop extracts are in propylene glycol. And there's this, I'm not sensitive to it, but they say there's a slickness to the palate. There's something pretty apparent, even at a very, very low rate.

Um, there's a lot of potential health stuff with propylene glycol too. And there, I know like whole foods no longer carries anything with propylene glycol, um, flavor wise. Um, but yeah, those are great. Um, I mean, these things are really cool because you can add them to plate to taste, uh, after the beer is complete and, and abstracts, I should mention, isn't the only company doing it. Yakima has hyper boost. And I know there's several other, uh, uh, companies in the business as well of making a hop oil extract that you can just add to a finished beer.

Yeah, no, and that's exactly, that's how I spent my afternoon. We did a tequila barrel aged triple IPA. We dry hopped it with Motuaka and it, it just didn't have quite that oomph. And luckily I had some Motuaka hop oil. And so I took a glass of 200 mils. I took my micro pipette and I dosed it and I gave it, you know, samples to the other brewers and to Scott and we all kind of discussed it and came up with the rate that we really liked. And, um,

It lets you, honestly, as a brewer, feel more like a chef. I mean, the big thing about cooking is you taste the beer or you taste the food as you're going. A little bit more salt. This maybe needs a little bit more acid. The recipe called for half a teaspoon of pepper. But, you know, for whatever reason, maybe I didn't grind it as fine as usual. It didn't pop. I'll add a little bit more. And with beer, I think that's a mindset that I had for sour beer for a long time. And now over the last couple of years, I've really embraced as...

Just part of what making an IPA or what making a stout is about, you know, it's we did a chili pepper stout and it wasn't spicy enough. So we did a little concentrated dried habanero extraction and dosed in three ounces of that. And that was, you know, the little bit of extra heat we needed. And so generally, my sort of opinion is I use extracts or tinctures or whatever it is to get the beer that I made to where I want it.

But then I learned that lesson of, hey, I need to add some vanilla extract to this orange vanilla beer. Next time, rather than adding one pound of vanilla beans, I'll add a pound and a half. Sure, sure. That's how I get this beer from good to very good. But then I learned that lesson, hopefully, to get it to that next level up. And I think the hop extracts are great for that. And again...

The sort of claim generally is that you will get better shelf life because hops auto-oxidize, they have trapped oxygen in the pellets. And so that by switching to more extract, you will improve shelf stability.

But it's really the way I always think about it is when they say the egg council says eating eggs lowers your cholesterol as long as you're eating eggs instead of eating liver or bacon or whatever it is. And so really what they're saying is if you dry hop at two pounds per barrel rather than four pounds per barrel, but then get your Aramax from hop oils, then you'll have better shelf life.

If you dry hop at four pounds per barrel and then add hop extract, it won't necessarily improve your hop extract. And I mean, shelf life is a real concern with a lot of these very hoppy beers. They just don't have... These aromatics don't survive very well for a variety of reasons, right? Yeah. And we've all gotten just so used to drinking fresh beer. I mean, I think that was one of the things...

that really turned me on to homebrewing originally was I would make an IPA and it would just absolutely blow out of the water these beers that I was getting on the shelf because they'd been sitting warm on the shelf for six months. I think that was homebrewers only for a while, but now that local tasting rooms, tap rooms, brew pubs have become so prevalent and everyone's doing IPAs and everyone's focused on really pushing things,

I think consumers have really gotten used to drinking really fresh, bright IPAs. I love my uncle. He's a fantastic guy. When I turned 21, he gave me a speech about how Heineken was the right beer to drink. Not too frou-frou, but shows you're kind of fancy.

He comes into Sapwood now and he drinks double IPA and he'll complain about, he'll complain about other people's double IPAs. He said, I won't name large West coast brewery, but he said he got, you know, a six pack on sale somewhere. And he said, I figured out why it was on sale. And the rest of it went down the sink. You know, he can't, he doesn't necessarily have, um, the, the, uh,

vocabulary to review a beer and communicate it but he knows what really good fresh ipa tastes like and i think more and more beer drinkers are um keyed into what makes a beer great and so much of it is freshness cold storage low package oxygen all those things that um

As a home brewer, you don't have to be quite as worried about, although for a lot of home brewers, if you make a five-gallon keg of IPA and you also want to go out and drink beer elsewhere, you might not be going through that five-gallon keg of IPA in three weeks or four weeks. It might be a month. And, you know, keeping your process good, yeah, really lets you enjoy that whole keg.

We played around for a while with pomegranate extract, elegiac acid, which helps to remove heavy metals, which promotes copper and iron facilitate catalyzed oxidation reactions.

And we were doing it in our hazy IPAs. And we were still doing it in almost everything else. But in the hazy IPAs, it promoted clarity. And so that was something where the market currently, the hazier, the paler, the better. And it was maybe one SRM and lightening up the haze just a little bit and just making the beer so they weren't that beautiful white golden glow. They were a little bit more...

Not even amber, but just maybe a little bit more golden. But that stuff has been great in stouts and lagers and all of those. I'd very much encourage people to look into that. There's a commercial version of a slightly different compound called MASH Life that Murphy & Sons distributes, or you can just buy a legic acid, and both of them do this great job chelating metals.

Awesome. I actually just wrote an article on metals, actually, and their effect on beer. But I wanted to ask here at the end, what are some of the results you've had? And what are your closing thoughts on dry hopping? Sure. I'd just say to really think about your dry hopping process is a tool. And so colder dry hopping is going to give you a bigger, fresher, really a more raw nose-in-the-hot-bag hop aroma.

rather than just those sort of brighter, fruitier sort of aromatics you might get from a smaller dose warmer. And to think about what kind of beer you want to make. Cold or dry hopping will produce a smoother, cleaner sort of thing. It won't give you as much perceived bitterness. And so I really like cold, dry hopping for, say, a West Coast Pilsner, where you're going on to a beer that's maybe finishing at, you know, one and a half or two Play-Doh.

And more bitterness, more harshness, more roughness is going to be more apparent. Same thing for a Saison, same thing for a mixed from dry sour beer. All of those, I think, really benefit from cold dry hopping because you really just want that bright, fresh hop aroma. Whereas, hey, a hazy triple IPA, we'll finish those at six or seven Play-Doh in the mid 1020s for specific gravity.

they can stand up to a little bit more roughness, a little bit more hop grittiness, for lack of a better phrasing. And that's something that we'll mix and match. We'll use some of those warmer dry hopping, some of that colder dry hopping. And so I just say, try these things out for yourself. Really drink your beer critically. Smell the hops, put down notes on those hops, see whether those compounds come through in the finished beer.

Try your beer next to other great breweries. If you made a Simcoe IPA and you live near a Treehouse or a Trillium or another half or a Monkish or a thousand other great breweries, and they happen to put out a Simcoe double IPA, get a can of theirs, get a draft of yours, bottle yours, whatever it is, pour them next to each other and go back and forth and really think about where your beer is better or where maybe theirs has the edge on yours.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Michael. I really appreciate you coming on the show and taking time. I know you're between trips, actually. I caught you just in time. Thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks again, Brad. I really appreciate getting to sit back and talk about beer. A pleasure. My guest today was Michael Tonsmeyer, the author of Sour Beers, as well as founder of Sapwood Cellars in Columbia, Maryland. Thank you again, Michael. Cheers, Brad. Thanks again.

Well, a big thank you to Michael Tonsmeyer for joining me this week. Thanks also to Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They recently added a collection of more than 500 beer recipes from pro brewers to their site. And most let you download the Beersmith recipe file. The new Craft Beer and Brewing recipe site is at beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes. Again, that site is beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes.

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