Racking Dry Hopped beer?

Ok, I just got done bottling Yooper's 60 min DFH clone, but it took way to long to rack the beer from my secondary to the bottling bucket. I dry hopped using loose leaf hops and just dropped them into the carboy during secondary, however only some of them dropped to the bottom and the rest stayed floating on top. So to rack I had to keep my racking cane in the middle but no matter what I did, sooner or later that stainless steel screen on the end of the racking cane would get clogged and the siphon would stop, which as you can imagine made for a very painful time trying to rack my beer into the bottling bucket.

I'm thinking next time I will be using a bag to dry hop to just avoid this mess all together, but I was just wondering how everyone else racks dry hopped beer like this since I've seen lots of pics on this website of people dry hopping without bags, and I am hoping that there is a trick for doing this that I just can't think of.

it is because of this that I try to dry hop with pellets when i can. Other than that the best tactic I have found is to wrap cheesecloth or a piece of a hop bag around the end of my racking cane with an elastic. It tends to stop whole hops from clogging the cane a little better than nothing on there.

I don't have a mesh screen or anything like that. My autosiphon has a little black tip on it that helps to keep out particles. I just rack, and try to avoid most of the floaties. It's worked pretty well for me.

I think it was Biermuncher who posted a picture of a paint strainer bag (sanitized) over his siphon. He said it worked well for him.

+1 Mine has that little tip and that works fine for me with whole hops! For pellets I use a sanitized paint strainer bag and a shot glass to weigh it down.

wyzazz said:

+1 Mine has that little tip and that works fine for me with whole hops! For pellets I use a sanitized paint strainer bag and a shot glass to weigh it down.

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Oh man, I've been messing with a bunch of marbles for weight....no more! From now on I'm going with the shot glass idea. Will it fit through the neck of a 5g glass carboy? Guess I'll go see.

I actually don't know, I dry hop in my primary and use an 8 gal sanke keg to ferment in. It fits right through the top with no issues, if you've got a lot of hops I'd recommend putting 2 shot glasses in there.

I'm confused. How can floating hops clog a racking cane that is on the bottom of the fermenter? If you racking cane is not on the bottom, why? I can see trub material getting in there, the black tips take care of that. I could see hop pellets getting in there, but the beauty of whole leaf hops is that they float. They shouldn't be anywhere near the intake of your racking cane until the end.

pkeeler, you are right. The problem i have had is at the end of the racking process when there is less beer and lots of hops. That is when they clog up.

I guess you could just stop there but who wants to waste a drop of that precious beer!

My racking cane does have the tip on the end but whole hops would cluster around it and clog the siphon.

pkeeler said:

I'm confused. How can floating hops clog a racking cane that is on the bottom of the fermenter? If you racking cane is not on the bottom, why? I can see trub material getting in there, the black tips take care of that. I could see hop pellets getting in there, but the beauty of whole leaf hops is that they float. They shouldn't be anywhere near the intake of your racking cane until the end.

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Because some of the hops dropped to the bottom and some of them stayed on top. When I initially started the siphon it worked just fine, but as the level in the carboy drops, beer between the top and bottom layer gets smaller and smaller. Plus for as much as I dry to keep from swirling the racking cane in there, sooner or later I always wind up moving it a little which then knocks some of the floating hops down and possibly stirs up some on the bottom.

Thanks for the input, I think next time I will try the bag over the cane tip with something to weight the bag down plus maybe something to keep the bag away from the tip of the cane too. That should give it plenty of bag surface area to suck beer through so it can pull hops against the bag without causing enough blockage to stop the siphon.