I can't point to this as the reason, but one of the best IPA's I've ever made (and I make a lot of them) used the Tasty McD-ish dry-hopping method at adding at least one round of dry hops during the final 1/3 of fermentation. The idea being the CO2 being forced out will help to blow off some of the oxygen (this is actually one of my questions...more below), and that you can compensate for aroma blowoff with...well, more dry hops.
We are trying this on our latest NE/VIPA (sorry I know some people don't like calling them VIPAs, but I just want to delineate that this is not a bone-dry WCIPA) that is currently 9 days post-pitch in a 14 gallon SS conical, fermented with 50% Hill Farmstead and 50% Conan yeast. Pitched at 68, raised to 72 at 6 days (~70% AA), currently at 72.
We are going to add the first round of dry hops (Mosaic/Simcoe/Centennial cocktail) now, and I advised my brewing partner to jack the temp to 73 to facilitate more blowoff.
My first question is relatively open-ended: how, if at all, do people minimize oxidation when adding dry hops. I had heard one method of boiling then cooling water (enough to cover the hops), then adding the hops to that water before adding to the beer. Intuitively, this makes sense, as we would only be adding 5-6 oz of water, hopefully not enough to materially affect gravity in a 14 gallon batch.
Second question is how does/could blowoff assist in minimizing oxidation (I think the theory is that the oxygen is actually trapped in the pelletized or dried whole cone hops themselves)? Do the CO2 bubbles simply 'carry' the O2 molecules out of solution as they head out of solution? I thought that oxidation actually meant oxygen was BINDING to molecules in the beer, in which case, 'northbound' co2 would pass right by the already-bound oxygen.
I know brewers like Alchemist claim to have proprietary dry hopping techniques that minimize oxidation. In fact, I read somewhere that a QC analyst looking at Heady Topper thought that his equipment was malfunctioning (!) This would explain (along with canning) why Heady can hold up for months.
Any thoughts are appreciated!