Trouble with trub.

I know that Capt. Kirk had Trouble with Tribbles but tonight was ridiculous.

Sometimes I strain the wort as it goes into the fermentor and sometimes I don't. My last creation was an IPA and I did NOT strain the wort AND dry hopped 1oz Cascade and 1oz Amarillo. I had major clogging of my bottling wand. I wrote into HBT and someone had a great idea of using a Muslin bag on the end of the auto-siphon to reduce the trub from getting into the bottling bucket. It worked until the bottom 1/3 of the bucket. Started to clog and my 5 year old relentlessly asked me to help him pass his current level on Angry Birds. Ugh as Charlie Brown would say! So in a minute of rage I took a fine strainer and sanitized it and just poured the rest of the beer through it into the bottling bucket. I did stir it a bit after I was done to make sure the priming sugar dissolved into the beer thoroughly.

I hope I didn't mess up this batch too much.

Thoughts?

And as always, thanks in advance.

Chris

Ps. I will make it a point to strain the wort before hitting the fermentor and will be using a muslin or hop bag for dry hopping in the future.

I had some similar troubles and found this link, made one and haven't had any trouble since.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/how-build-hop-spider-filter-hops-your-wort-231971/

I like the idea. What about dry hopping? Do you use a hop or muslin bag?

The only thing you need to worry about is oxygenation.

At least you didn't have this happen:

I had a quad in my primary and was in the process of brewing my tripel. The plan was to rack the quad to secondary and put the tripel in the primary that was previously occupied.

Well, I guess I accumulated some bad karma, because my autosiphon decided to stop forming a seal after about 1/3 of my quad had been racked. I was then forced to repeatedly pump the quad through the autosiphon since it would not maintain suction. I probably oxygenated it a fair amount to say the least. While I was doing this, my tripel stayed on the boil, and I missed my post boil volume by a gallon. Then the real fun began. I started siphoning my tripel into the carboy, but at this point the siphon required constant pumping to function. It took over 20 minutes of giving that thing attention to finish the job. If I was a hooker, I could have made 100 bucks.

End result: The most expensive beer and time consuming beer I've ever brewed (triple decocted and aged for months too) may have been ruined, and my tripel is not doing well. It ended up 20 points higher and is really putting out some acrid smells while bubbling away when krausen should have dropped a while ago. I immediately ordered two autosiphons, one as a backup.

In your case, try buying a copper scrubbing pad and using a rubber band to attach it to your siphon. I know it's a little late, but that's what I did when faced with a similar situation.

Hebby5 said:

I like the idea. What about dry hopping? Do you use a hop or muslin bag?

Click to expand...

I have been using a 1 gallon paint strainer bag for dry hopping with pretty good success. I soak it in starsan along with a piece of unflavored dental floss. I put my hops in and tie it off with one end of the floss. I then put it in my primary hanging it with the floss. The floss is pinched in between the stopper and the lip of the fermenter so the bag doesn't touch the bottom. The floss makes for easy extraction of the hops bag.

I always strain using the 10" strainer. I strain multiple times back and forth between BK and bucket. When doing brews with large amounts of hops, the 10" strainer will fill up before it all gets poured from the BK. When this happens I use a large flat spoon to scrape the hops around the inside of the strainer until the beer gets through the strainer into the bucket. It works best with two people. Then, I scoop out all of the hops into the garbage, use a hose to spray off the strainer, dip into star san and then pour back into the BK. Repeat, back again into the bucket and then back into the Bk. Then I add the yeast to the bucket and pour a final time. I pour 5 times and I get almost all of the hops out. Plus its a great aeration technique.
After 4 weeks in primary the cake is packed pretty tight, maybe only an 1" thick, even after dry hopping for a week (no hop bag). Even so, I always put a 1 gal. paint strainer bag on the end of the hose in the bottom of the bottle bucket. Works much better than on the siphon end. Crystal clear IPA's every time. This also works well when using real fruit.

That's a good idea putting the strainer on the outlet of the siphon.

Thanks for all the tips.

Deuce - what are the oxygenation issues now that it's all bottled? Off flavors? Bottle bombs?