What Is Dry Hopping? Dry Hopped and DDH Beer Explained

Q: What is dry hopping?

Adding hops after the boil, usually to the fermenter or conditioning tank once fermentation is done, to add fresh hop aroma and flavour.

Q: Does dry hopping make beer more bitter?

Not much. The hops aren’t boiled, so their alpha acids don’t become bitter iso-alpha acids, and dry hopping adds no measurable IBUs. Tasting trials show perceived bitterness can still rise.

Q: What does DDH mean?

Double dry hopped. There’s no agreed technical definition: it can mean two dry-hop additions or a double dose. BarthHaas reads it as dry hopping more than once.

Q: What does TDH mean?

Triple dry hopped: dry hopped three times.

Q: Can dry hopping add alcohol?

It can, if live yeast is still in the beer: enzymes in hops can free up sugars for the yeast, which brewers call hop creep. Alfa Laval says it isn’t an issue when a 0.0% beer is dry hopped after the alcohol has been removed, because no yeast is left.

Q: How common is dry-hopped alcohol-free beer?

Not rare: 23 of the 373 beers in our directory say they’re dry-hopped or double dry-hopped, from IPAs to lagers, a stout and a sour.

The short answer

Dry hopping is “the addition of hops to beer in the fermenting, conditioning, or serving vessel”: after the boil, usually once fermentation is done. Its purpose is “to infuse beer with additional fresh hop flavor and aroma.” Because the hops aren’t boiled, their alpha acids “are not isomerized”, so it adds little bitterness, though “some tasting trials have shown clearly that the bitterness perception of beer can be increased by dry hopping”.^[1] DDH, double dry hopped, has no agreed meaning: “exactly what DDH means in technical terms has not been defined by the brewing community”, and BarthHaas reads it as dry hopping more than once.^[2] In alcohol-free beer it matters even more: dealcoholisation strips aroma, and Alfa Laval recommends dry hopping 0.0% beers after the alcohol is removed.^[3] 23 beers in our directory say they’re dry-hopped.

Below: how dry hopping works, where it came from, DDH and TDH, hazy IPAs, hop creep, dry hopping in alcohol-free beer, and the dry-hopped alcohol-free beers in our directory. For the other hop additions, see when brewers add hops.

How dry hopping works

“After fermentation, brewers usually cool the beer and allow most of its yeast to sediment out before dry hopping.” Then the hops go in, and their oils dissolve into the beer. Temperature matters: “Dry hopping performed at 4.4°C (40°F) may easily take twice as long to achieve similar intensity” as at warmer temperatures. So does time: “most brewers who dry hop heavily try to keep contact time to 1 week or less,” because “Unpleasant grassy, vegetal, chlorophyll flavors can result from extended contact time”. And dry-hopped beer is “inherently less stable” than other beer, the Oxford Companion notes.^[1]

Boil hops, whirlpool hops and dry hops compared
	When	Bitterness	Aroma
Bittering hops	Early in the boil, “usually 60 minutes or more”^[4]	Most: the alpha acids are converted	Little: the oils boil off
Late boil and whirlpool	End of the boil, or resting in hot wort at 60–77°C^[5]	Some to little	Much of it kept
Dry hops	In the fermenter or conditioning tank, after the boil^[1]	“no measurable IBUs”^[5], though perceived bitterness can rise^[1]	The most

Where dry hopping came from

It grew up with English cask ale. “The practice is most closely associated with English pale ales and their variants.” “From the mid 1800s onward, the most common technique was the addition of a large handful of dried whole hops” to the cask.^[1] Hop plugs, “just tiny hops bales of only an ounce or two (28 to 57 g)”, are still made for the job.^[6]

What does DDH mean? Double and triple dry hopping

DDH stands for double dry hopped. The trouble is that “exactly what DDH means in technical terms has not been defined by the brewing community.” BarthHaas puts the question: “A double dose or two doses of dry hopping?” Its answer: “Everything points to multiple dry hopping!”, because “each point of dry hopping will lend a different hop aroma to the beer”. It isn’t a fan of simply doubling the dose: “adding astronomical quantities just doesn’t help. It only increases beer loss.”^[2]

Then there’s TDH, triple dry hopped: “the best DDH is TDH (triple dry hopping),” BarthHaas says. The letters are recent, BarthHaas wrote in 2021: “It’s only recently that the letters DDH began to circulate in the beer world,” arriving “with the wave of NEIPAs”.^[2] Don’t confuse TDH with “triple hopped”, which can mean three additions, three hops or three times the hops: see what does triple hopped mean?

Dry hopping and hazy IPA

Hazy IPA is built on dry hopping. The BJCP guidelines call for “An emphasis on late hopping, especially dry-hopping”, “Heavily dry-hopped, partly during active fermentation”, and they’re clear about the cloudiness: “Haziness comes from dry-hopping, not suspended yeast, starch haze, or other techniques”. Hopping during fermentation adds something too: “Biotransformation of hop oils during fermentation adds to the depth and fruit complexity.”^[7] More in what is hazy IPA? and why is hazy IPA cloudy?

Hop creep: when dry hops restart fermentation

Dry hops aren’t inert. Research by Thomas Shellhammer and Kaylyn Kirkpatrick found hops “contain biologically active compounds that restart the fermentation process and alter the final composition of beer”, breaking down carbohydrates the yeast couldn’t use, “shifting the balance to more fermentable sugars and thus increasing the alcohol content”. That can mean “an unexpectedly high alcohol content and high pressures that could cause beer bottles to break”.^[8] “Hop creep is a term that has been recently popping up in commercial craft brewing circles” for exactly this.^[9]

For a brewer aiming at 0.5% or less, unexpected extra alcohol is the last thing they want. Dry hopping after the alcohol has been removed avoids it: “There is no residual yeast present after dry hopping 0.0 beer, which means that hop creep is not an issue,” Alfa Laval says.^[3]

Dry hopping in alcohol-free beer

Removing the alcohol takes aroma with it. Alfa Laval, which makes dealcoholisation equipment, says its process typically recovers about 50% of a beer’s aroma when the target is under 0.5%, and about 25% for 0.0% beer. It notes that “Some of the hop oils are not compatible with reverse osmosis membranes”, and its advice is plain: “We recommend dry hopping 0.0 beers after dealcoholization.”^[3] Without alcohol, “bitterness, sweetness, and aroma can quickly become unbalanced,” BarthHaas’s Christina Schönberger says.^[10] Dry hops are one way to put the aroma back.

In our directory, 23 alcohol-free beers say they’re dry-hopped or double dry-hopped: 8 IPAs, 4 lagers, 3 hazy IPAs, 3 pale ales, 2 sours, 2 wheat beers and 1 stout.

The dry-hopped alcohol-free beers in our directory

Every beer in our directory whose page says it’s dry-hopped or double dry-hopped, by Unhopped score. Hops where we’ve checked them: a dash in the hops column means we haven’t confirmed them, and in the score column that we haven’t scored the beer yet.

23 dry-hopped alcohol-free beers, 6 November 2026
Beer	Style	ABV	Score	Hops named
Big Drop Poolside DDH IPA	Hazy IPA	0.5%	8.6	Azacca, Chinook, Mosaic and Motueka
Brulo Lust for Life DDH IPA	IPA	0.5%	8.6	Simcoe, Citra and Mosaic
Brulo Cascadian Tides Stout	Stout	0.5%	8.4	Columbus and Simcoe
Mash Gang x Siren Out of Nowhere Pilsner	Lager	0.5%	8.3	Citra, Idaho 7 and Nelson Sauvin
Mash Gang Siege Perilous Lager	Lager	0.5%	8.1	Saaz
Clausthaler Dry Hopped	Lager	0.4%	7.7	Cascade
Brooklyn Special Effects	Lager	0.4%	7.6	Mosaic, Citra and Amarillo
BrewDog Nanny State	Pale ale	0.5%	7.2	Centennial, Chinook, Cascade and Simcoe
Alefarm Paraglow DDH IPA	IPA	0.5%	—	Azacca, Strata and Simcoe
Bellwoods Non-Alcoholic Jelly King	Sour	0.5%	—	—
Below Brew Co Ohana	Pale ale	0.5%	—	BRU-1 and Sabro
Blackjack Electric Circus	Pale ale	0.5%	—	Mosaic and Citra
Brulo 7 Hop 7 Grain DDH IPA	IPA	0.5%	—	Nelson Sauvin, Sabro, Simcoe, Azacca, Citra, Columbus and Mosaic
DEYA Eye For Symmetry IPA	Hazy IPA	0.5%	—	Mosaic, El Dorado, Motueka and Nelson Sauvin
Huyghe Paranoia Alcohol Free	Wheat beer	0.3%	—	Citra and Mosaic
Infinite Session IPA	IPA	0.5%	—	Amarillo and Citra
Jump Ship Dazzle Ship Azacca IPA	IPA	<0.5%	—	Azacca
Klokk & Co FRIPA	IPA	0.5%	—	—
Lupulus Placebo	Wheat beer	0.4%	—	Mosaic, Citra and Sabro
Omnipollo Believe West Coast IPA	IPA	0.5%	—	Simcoe
Sureshot x We Can Be Friends I’m The Shadowman	Hazy IPA	0.5%	—	Citra and Nectaron
Ter Dolen IPA Op De Dool	IPA	0.3%	—	—
We Can Be Friends Cloudy Krush	Sour	0.5%	—	—

They’re not all IPAs: Clausthaler Dry Hopped and Brooklyn Special Effects are dry-hopped lagers, Brulo Cascadian Tides Stout is a dry-hopped stout, and Bellwoods Non-Alcoholic Jelly King a dry-hopped sour. For the best of the hop-forward ones, with prices, see the best hoppy alcohol-free beers.

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