"Dry Herbing" with lemon thyme or other herbs

[matthiery]

Hello everyone,
I am planning on brewing a beer with Lemon Thyme (recipe here: https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/249885/lemon-thyme-saison ), and the recipe calls for "dry hopping " with Lemon Thyme. Let's call it Dry Herbing. I did a bit of research, and can't really find a straight answer, so... Does anyone know if you'd need to give it a quick boil before dry hopping with fresh lemon thyme, or fresh or dry herbs in general? I figured that if you don't, well, you could end up with an infection, perhaps especially with fresh herbs picked straight from the plant? But if you do boil it, well I guess you'd loke a lot of the benefits of "dry herbing", since a lot of the aroma might be boiled off. So, I roughly see 3 scenarios:
1) don't boil, just add the fresh herbs, and pray.
2) Boil, and add.
3) give it a quick boil, say 5 minutes, then add cold water to lower the temperature very fast, and add it all to the wort, together with your hops in a bag if you are dry hopping as well.
What do you guys think? If anyone has any experience with this, it'd be greatly appreciated.
Have a good day everyone,
cheers!

 

[McMullan]

It's going to be fine just adding the herbs without boiling. The low pH and ethanol are unlikely to be suitable conditions for an infection to establish. Most infections in beer, which are quite rare anyway, establish early in the process, when the wort is sweet. Obviously, you'd need to add considerably more fresh relative to dry herbs. Assume 90% vs 10% water content, respectively.

 

[matthiery]

Great, thank you very much, I'll try this, and will let you know how it turns out,

thanks a lot!