marcb

Recipes 

Hi,

That is actually the water out for my tankless water heater and a bad camera angle as it makes the floating thermometer look like its attached to the water out. I'm happy to post a pic of that assembly though as if you added a 6" stainless nipple, another elbow and a 1/2" mpt to 3/8" barb you would indeed have a nice whirlpool contraption for your boil kettle.

weebop

Recipes 

just ordered a hop strainer from stainless brewing! soooo stoked. By the way he just lowered his price on his strainers by $10!

marcb

Recipes 

Cool, shouldn't you post this on his vendor showcase page??? Why don't you get it, use it and then lets see how great it works and post some pics to help better inform others on the forum. I don't understand how people haven't used something for brewing but feel compelled to wax poetic about how great it is.....

bovineblitz

Recipes 

A friend of mine got a giant sized one from Stainless and used it last week, worked great.

marcb

Recipes 

Is this the giant one that was crushed en route and was held together with hose clamps and rivets? I'd love to see pics. Was this a grain basket or hop strainer? What micron did they use? What was the hop bill of their recipe. Saying someone got something and it worked great is useless for the rest of us that are trying to be analytical in our approach and equipment purchases. I love all the hoopla about the Stainless brewing guy that he has to request that other people post to this thread and constantly complain to the mods. I don't make products or sell products. I build, buy and test stuff for my own home brewing--- I post the output for others to learn from my experiences so that they can make better educated decisions when they pull the trigger. There are a million hop spider threads.... post on those. I will tell you this, after all the crap that was pulled on this thread by Stainless Brewing I would NEVER do business with them.

bottlebomber

Recipes 

+1 to this. I got a really bad vibe with all the whining in the beginning. I'm just glad chad vendored up so it doesn't have to be weird anymore. I still haven't bought his product, but I 100% intend to, especially after my last brew day using 10 ounces of pellets without bags and losing a gallon+ of beer with a messy fermenter to boot. I'm thinking the courser filter, the 400?

weebop

Recipes 

I would like to apologize to anyone else on the thread that felt this way about my post. The purpose was to notify other readers who were in the market to buy that there was a recent decrease in price. Wasn't trying to poetically gloat about how great it is...although I would like to thank marcb for such a complement to my writing. Never heard it be called poetic before. Perhaps you could email my humanities professor because that SOB doesnt think so...

bovineblitz

Recipes 

400 micron. It wasn't the crazy huge one, I think it's a 10 or 12" ring, not sure of the height. It is held with clamps and rivets. I know I saw pics but can't find them. I'll probably check it out in person this weekend, hopefully he's brewing but regardless I can get more info and pictures. The hop bill was fairly large, over 8oz of a combination of pellets and leaf hops in a wheat and the secondhand feedback I have is that it strained very well.

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Personally I bought one from Chad (beautifully seam welded vs rivets and a clamp plus a better price seems like a no brainer to me) and I love it, 400 micron (per feedback on this thread) 6x14 basket that hangs on the side of the pot which I find less clunky than a spider. I used it three times so far, the batch yesterday had 5.5oz of hops across the boil (2oz were flameout) and there was plenty of motion inside the basket. It drained quickly and there was a LOT of hop material inside the basket, at least 3 inches. I didn't notice any green that got through the mesh. Previous batches had about 4oz of hops and 5oz, worked great both times and has never seemed saturated. At some point in the near future I'll make an outrageous IPA and see if I can oversaturate it. A few people in this thread noted that the 400 lets some material through, I haven't seen anything getting through. It's possible that it depends on the specific pellets, since from what I understand they're sometimes ground differently.

edit: I'm not sure how important this is but I like to let the hot break occur, then I put the strainer in. It seems to me that less gunk sticks to it, though I don't really have any proof of that. My first batch I started off with it in the wort and it looked pretty gunked up. I didn't notice any utilization issue though.

These aren't really the most useful pics in the world but I'll post them anyways. That's a 10gal Polarware pot for reference.





Better?

marcb

Recipes 

Out and out awesome, thank you. Sorry for being snarky, this thread has taken some twists and turns recently and not very pleasant. It is not my intent to flame anyone, nor am I pushing any products. I see a tremendous amount of value in sharing data and experience in this community.

bovineblitz

Recipes 

Fair enough, no worries. Clearly, a lot of us are very happy you asked so many questions in the first place and spurred this whole thing. It's probably my favorite brewing toy and I think half my homebrew club is gonna buy one now. It's definitely the most elegant solution I've seen and the utility/cost is up there with the ebay temp controller. It's a great example of why I think it's well worth being a premium member of this site and supporting the medium through which we can exchange all these great ideas.

So yeah, cheers!