Glossary
Dry hopping
Adding hops to beer after fermentation, with no heat, to extract aroma compounds without adding measurable bitterness.
Also called dry hop, dry hopped.
The full record
Dry hopping has its own catalogue entry with the detail this page summarises — causes, thresholds, related styles and evidence.
Dry hopping — Add hops to beer after fermentation, without heat, to extract aroma compounds while adding essentially no bitterness.
Without heat there is no isomerisation, so dry hopping contributes aroma and flavour but essentially no IBU. It is the technique that made modern hop-forward beer possible.
Its costs are real: dry-hopped aroma is the least stable thing in beer and fades within weeks, dry hopping introduces oxygen unless carefully managed, and heavy charges can produce a harsh, vegetal grip known as hop burn. Enzymes carried in on the hops can also restart fermentation, which is the cause of hop creep.
Related
- Isomerisation — The reaction dry hopping avoids.
- Hop creep — The refermentation risk it carries.
- Hop burn — What too much of it produces.
- Biotransformation — Yeast reworking hop compounds during a dry hop.
- New England IPA — The style built most completely on the technique.
More vocabulary
Arrested fermentation · Barrel ageing · Batch sparging · Biotransformation · Blending · Bottle conditioning · Bottom fermentation · Burtonisation · Cask conditioning · Centrifugation
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.