Recirculating through a hop spider?

I recently started using a pump to recirculate my wort during chilling. I also built a hop spider. I've been thinking about recirculating the wort through the hop spider (made with a paint strainer bag) in an attempt to reduce the trub that gets into the fermenters. Has anybody tried this?

Sometimes, depending on break material you can wind up with a bag of wort/hops that won't easily drain. You won't know till you try.

Spartan1979 said:

Has anybody tried this?

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Yes, and I found that I prefer the results from whirlpooling, but as always YMMV.

I had a similar question...

I recirculate cooling wort through my hop spider with a paint strainer bag. I find that it reduces trub, but I mainly recirculate through my plate chiller in warmer weather to chill the wort enough to ferment. I do have to watch that the strainer bag doesn't block the outlet of the boil kettle during recirculating.

I tried this today. I didn't put the hop spider in until 15 minutes left in the boil to sterilize it. At knockout I started recirculating through the hop spider. When I was ready to move the wort to the carboy, I turn the hop spider over which effectively lifted the bag up enough that it wasn't sitting on the bottom any more. The wort drained nicely and I got a lot less trub than I normally get. The only drawback was that the wort didn't seem to cool as quickly. The circulation probably wasn't moving as well since it was going through the hop bag.

Yes. When I do this, my recirc arm is a piece of loc-line and I jump from in to outside of the hop spider when chilling or I'll get stratification of temps inside the spider. My spider doesn't cover the whole tun like a lot of folks. Mine is about 6 gallons big in a 17 gal tun.

I'm thinking of making mine smaller. Also, I do get an overflow when I try to recirc entirely in the spider.