This brew went ballistic right after simultaneously pitching an iffy starter and a packet of dry yeast just four days ago, and appears to have been holding stable for almost 24 hours, though the colour is still quite light and has a terrific haze. Think that may have something to do with me forgetting to add the Protafloc – oops!

No matter. I dry-hopped today because I’m confident that it’s going no further in the three days that those hops will be in there, not counting the time I’ll spend cold-crashing. I’m not sure if time spent at 1℃ will count towards the dry-hop time; hoppy beer should be drunk fresh (which makes me think that it does count somehow) but then again if it were that critical we’d be adding hop oils right before drinking, since the cold-crash is at or below regular fridge temperature.

One thing I did differently this time around was to add the hops via the top, removal of which wan necessary anyway since I’d not yet fitted the floating dip tube. The collection jar seems well and truly full of trub and spent yeast, but I didn’t remove it to dump that lot out since I couldn’t be sure I’d closed the butterfly valve fully – didn’t ‘click’ into place horizontally as before so I wasn’t about the remove the jar and start leaking beer everywhere.

In therms of pressure we’ve been at 5 PSI right since the start of fermentation, and I released this quite slowly in order to minimise stress on my Tilt digital hydrometer. I’ve not had a pressure-related ingress into the devise yet (touch wood) but it must be a factor. Once the hops were in I increased pressure very gradually to 10 PSI from the bottle, so that I own’t have to faff about with the bag once we start cold-crashing. Hopefully 10 PSI will be enough …