Hop Stopper first use = not happy

Bobby_M said:

The reason you have to slow the flow down towards the end of the drain is that the hop debris built up on the screen slows how fast wort can drain into the interior of the pocket. If the wort level hits the screen height and you pump all of the wort out of the interior, you suck air and lose prime on the pump. You have to close off the valve on the output of the pump to nearly a trickle just before your wort hits the height of the top of the screen. If you feel like the slowed flow is going to overchill the wort, dial your coolant down slower also.

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This is what happened to me.

julian81 said:

OK well I definitely have a few things to try. One of my concerns is the dip tube that the Hop Stopper came with doesn't have the machined groove in it like the blichmann one does so it doesn't "click" into place with the O-ring in the bulkhead. It's just a smooth surface so it provides for more wiggle. That being said, I'm going to cut the dip tube so it's centered more, try to whirlpool a bit after boil and before draining, and then slow the output down like you've suggested. If none of this solves the problem, I'm going to return the Hop Stopper and probably try the Hop Blocker next.

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So... what happened?

I'd also like to hear an update on this. I have a hop stopper and use mostly leaf hops. I normally just gravity drain, though I have 2 chugger pumps. I drain VERY slowly to prevent breaking the siphon, but the last few batches, the hop stopper has clogged on me. Flow will stop when the level gets low, but siphon hasn't been broken yet. If I flip the pump on, I can see the Hop Stopper go concave from the negative pressure inside. Last batch I had to stick my hand in scalding wort to remove the hop stopper and dip tube, then I removed the hop stopper, and put the dip tube in bare. I am going to try the SS scrubby approach and see if that helps. I find it strange that so many people have no problems with the HS and I do. I'd really like to keep it, but not if it doesn't do the job. When I cleaned the big chunks of hops off, the screen has a resiny film blocking all the little pores.

ElevenBrewCo said:

I works fine with pellet hops. Ive haf no issues with it at all.

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I'm sorry, but this is false. You must not brew very hoppy beers because I clogged many a scrubbie with pellets before making a hop spider. The pliny clone was the worst. :X

I'm having the same problem as everyone else. Once the wort level gets down to the outlet port/Hop Stopper, I lose prime in my pump and I'm done. Today I was super-careful and cranked back the flow to a bare trickle, but it still lost suction with at least 3 quarts left in the kettle. I'm getting pretty frustrated at dumping almost a gallon of perfectly good wort down my driveway.

I installed a hop stopper when I built my kal clone, and frankly - it's garbage. While it will work acceptably in some cases (if you watch your pump speed like a hawk) it is very susceptible to hop type, quantity, hot break, wort composition (wheat, etc)... it's just an extremely inconsistent solution.

After fighting it for 10 batches or so I went back to the standard blichmann dip tube, and placed a Brewer's Hardware TC filter inline between the kettle and the pump. I run the 2 micron screen on the filter, and have not had it clog yet, even on tricky batches. It's a breeze to clean, relatively, and it does double duty to catch dry hops when I pressure transfer from my conical to kegs.

I think the main difference between the hop stopper and the TC filter is where the pump suction resolves. With the hop stopper, the suction resolves in the kettle, and air is readily able to enter the "pocket" faster than wort, and get drawn into the dip tube. With the TC filter, the suction resolves inside the filter chamber, so all it's doing is drawing wort through the filter (a good thing) rather than drawing in atmosphere - because the dip tube is before the filter and is still full of wort.

After switching to the TC filter, I can get nearly a gallon more wort into the fermentor, with a lot less frustration.

I modified my approach this weekend and was able to get better results. Basically what I did differently was instead of directing the chilled wort from the plate chiller outlet into the fermenter, I instead pumped it back into the boil kettle (in a whirlpool action). By monitoring the thermometer on my kettle, I could see when the temperature of the wort had dropped to the desired level (60° F). And by pumping it back into the kettle, I was able to run the flow wide open without worrying about the Hop Stopper losing suction (because the kettle remained full the entire time). But it still filtered out most of the break material.

Once the wort was cooled enough, I turned off the pump and chiller, and racked the wort to a fermenter using a plain old autosiphon. This allowed me to get every last drop of wort, without having to rely on the Hop Stopper and the pickup tube (which consistently lose suction on me with several quarts remaining in the kettle).

I was quite happy with this approach, and thought maybe someone else might benefit from it too.

julian81 said:

Hrm, yeah but whirlfloc/irish moss is kind of a common thing to add to beers. I would have assumed that with this addition clogging wouldn't be an issue as compared to the 26oz hop test that the Hop Stopper went through. Also, I'm not confident it would have worked without the whirlfloc...

But yeah, I'm not so happy with this thing. I'm leaning towards either trying the Blichmann Hop Blocker and/or the Blichmann flase bottom with nylon mesh bags for my hops (does that affect your utilization?)

Do you use a false bottom when using pellet hops too as an added filter or only for leaf hops?

Thanks for the reply!

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Personally, I'd dump the plate chiller. My buddy and I had so many problems with our shirron plate chiller that we abandoned it and built a CFC copper-pipe-within-a-garden-hose chiller. No more clogs. We tried lots of different mesh screens in order to try to stop the hop material from getting through, but more often than not it didn't work.

Well, I think I'm done with the Hop Stopper. This weekend, I brewed 10 gallons of an Amarillo IPA. With 15 minutes left in the boil, I turned on my pump and began recirculating boiling wort through my chiller and lines to sanitize everything. After about 5 minutes, the pump lost suction and the line from the kettle was full of bubbles. Once again, the Hop Stopper had become completely caked over with break material (I even have a separate hop screen for my hops, so there are no actual hops loose in the wort!) and could not pass through the screen to the pickup tube. So I had 10 gallons of boiling hot wort that would not come out the valve port.

What to do? My old immersion chiller has been sitting in the garage, unused, for over a year, and the clamps are rusty and unreliable, so I didn't feel comfortable using it.

I ended up dumping the boiling wort into several smaller pots to get it out of my boil kettle. I dumped a bucket of cold water into my kettle to cool it quickly, then removed the Hop Stopper, returned the wort back into the kettle and heated it back to boiling. It worked, but it messed up my hop schedule. I chilled it as usual with my plate chiller, which did not clog (possibly because a good amount of break material had already been removed, caked onto the Hop Stopper).

The thing is difficult to clean and is very prone to clogging, even when the boil contains no lose hops at all. The break material alone is enough to choke this thing off completely. Going forward, I think I'm just going to take my chances running unfiltered wort through my plate chiller. What other options do I have?

I do 2 things to help the hop stopper. An addition of whole hops and a long handled heat resistant spoon. The whole hops help keep the screen from clogging and the spoon can be put in the boil for the last 15 minutes to sanitize and be used to scrape the screen if it clogs.