Today I’m going to highlight some of the new dry hop features in BeerSmith 3.1. BeerSmith 3.1 was released in mid-2020.
Dry hopping is one of the best ways to preserve aroma oils in your hops. Because it is done at low temperature, you don’t risk boiling off volatile aroma oils. Also the long contact time lets you infuse your beer with hop aroma over a period of days.
While previous versions of BeerSmith have always supported dry hops, the program simply let you specify the dry hop time. About 10 years ago most dry hops were added at the end of fermentation and aging, usually shortly before bottling.
With the Craft Beer IPA revolution, brewers started using dry hops in much larger quantities and often for shorter periods of time. In addition, many IPAs are double or triple dry hopped which means they add more than one dry hop addition, often spaced across different stages of the fermentation and aging.
In addition, the push for “fruity” flavored IPAs and New England IPAs has driven many brewers to experiment with hopping in the primary fermentation as a method for promoting biotransformations. American and Australia/New Zealand hops high in Gerianol and Thiols can often develop tropical fruit flavor and aroma if used late in the primary.
BeerSmith 3.1 Dry Hops
To support the newer utilization of dry hops, I added both a dry hop start time and start phase to the program. So for example you can now specify a traditional dry hop that is 3 days before bottling, but you can also specify a dry hop 4 days into the primary fermentation.
This gives you a lot more flexibility to record your dry hop additions, and you can better specify double and triple dry hopped beers. To use this feature, just add a new hop to your recipe and then select “Dry Hop” for the use field. The extra fields for start of dry hop and phase of the dry hop will be shown so you can specify the starting point and duration.
A lot of brewers also asked that dry hops be added to the calendar view, which has also been done. So now you can view a recipe from the calendar view (under Recipes->Calendar – and don’t forget to set the brew date for the recipe first), and it will also show when to add your dry hops.
I hope you enjoy some of the features in BeerSmith 3.1 – if you want to learn more about dry hopping, check out my two part series here. Thanks for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog. Please sign up for the newsletter or subscribe to my podcast for more beer brewing goodness.
When will the be available for Linux?
Hello Brad,
I’m really enjoying the Beersmith and learning a lot with Beersmith podcast, very good talks and insights !!!
Talking about the BeerSmith 3.1 ; seems that I’m with 3.0 version and that new features are not appearing to me! what can I do to update that?
With best Regards,
Rafael Junior
Just download and install BeerSmith 3.1 from the main BeerSmith download page.
I’m in beta testing now and hoping to have the Linux version available around the 1st of August for download
Hi Brad! How do I configure a dry hop added on the first day of primary? In my case, the beer would remain in the same fermenter during the secondary, for a total of 15 days. Thank you
In the newer versions you can specify dry hop as the use, then put in “Dry hop for” 15 days, “Start Dry Hop” at 1 day, and under “Dry Hop Phase” select “Days into primary”