Strain hop pellets from wort

For my 4th batch I had a major issue with trying to strain the hop pellets from the wort. The wort wouldn't drain because all the debris clogged it. Is there a way to avoid this? Should I even bother trying? Should I just dump it all into the fermenter?

That's what I do- just dump all of it into the primary. If I had a counterflow chiller, or something that would clog, I'd have to do it differently. But for the last several years, I just dump it all in to primary. If I have a ton of leaf hops, often I'll strain through a sanitized colander, just because it's so easy to do. But pellet hops disintegrate into sludge, and settle to the bottom, so I just dump it all in.

YooperBrew said:

That's what I do- just dump all of it into the primary. If I had a counterflow chiller, or something that would clog, I'd have to do it differently. But for the last several years, I just dump it all in to primary. If I have a ton of leaf hops, often I'll strain through a sanitized colander, just because it's so easy to do. But pellet hops disintegrate into sludge, and settle to the bottom, so I just dump it all in.

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+1!

If I have the hop socks, I'll use them, if not, I don't worry about it.

Use a fine nylon bag to put them in. For each time point during the boil, just pick the bag up, open it, and add more hops. Works for leaf and pellet hops.

Austinhomebrew sells them for like $4.

I'm not sure why but for batch 2 and 3 I used pellets and my strainer that sits inside the funnel worked. So this time when it failed I was very frustrated and panicked. I also assumed you had to filter them out before going to the primary.

Several people around here use something like this. 5 gal paint strainer clamped to a PVC coupler w/ rods to support it above your kettle.

SS scrubby over the dip tube

Lil' Sparky said:

Several people around here use something like this. 5 gal paint strainer clamped to a PVC coupler w/ rods to support it above your kettle.

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And that keeps the pellet remains in the strainer? I didn't think those were fine enough to keep the remains inside.

Also, can you reuse that strainer or is it impossible to clean?

So, is it better to keep the hop pellets out of the primary as I suspected?

pretzelb said:

And that keeps the pellet remains in the strainer? I didn't think those were fine enough to keep the remains inside.

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Yes, it's fine enough to keep the clogging particles out.

pretzelb said:

Also, can you reuse that strainer or is it impossible to clean?

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yes, over and over again

pretzelb said:

So, is it better to keep the hop pellets out of the primary as I suspected?

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Not really. If you're doing 5 gal batches and just want to dump everything into a bucket, that's fine. It won't adversely affect your beer. Most people want to filter the hops out if they're using a pickup tube, a CFC, or a plate chiller, so that the hops don't cause a clog.

I wish I knew why I got the idea that I had to strain the pellet debris out. Maybe from the beginner books which I think assume real hops and instruct you to strain them out, which led me to assume that pellets would follow the same rule. Regardless, it was an assumption on my part.

As neat as the strain bag idea looks, I may just forget about it and dump everything into my primary from here on in. Until I get a decent batch under my belt I just can't justify spending more time and money on equipment.

Then again, here's a thought. Instead of the PVC bolt idea that someone posted a picture of in this thread, could you just hang the paint strainer from a skewer that is hanging over the pot? I used a skewer to hang my thermometer and suspend my grain bag so it seems like this would work too. Only difficulty would be opening it back up to add more hops after the first but I think I could manage that. I might try this next time.

Sure you could do that. You could also just use stainless clips (or anything else that won't melt) and clip it to your pot.

One thing to be aware of with using hops bags- make sure the hops are "loose" in there. If you tightly pack a small bag, the hops utilization will suffer- that's why you see the big bags in the pictures. If you buy a "hops bag", they are pretty small and really don't allow the hops to be free in the wort. You want the wort to go freely through the bag, and the hops to be freely moving in whatever kind of bag you use.

If you don't NEED to filter the hops for one of the reasons listed above, I'd just dump everything in and not worry about it.

YooperBrew said:

Sure you could do that. You could also just use stainless clips (or anything else that won't melt) and clip it to your pot.

One thing to be aware of with using hops bags- make sure the hops are "loose" in there. If you tightly pack a small bag, the hops utilization will suffer- that's why you see the big bags in the pictures. If you buy a "hops bag", they are pretty small and really don't allow the hops to be free in the wort. You want the wort to go freely through the bag, and the hops to be freely moving in whatever kind of bag you use.

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That makes sense.

Do you also have to worry about the bag touching the sides of the boiling pot? It would seem like those paint strainers from Home Depot aren't really designed to take any kind of heat.

If you're going to use a strainer bag, I wouldn't let it touch the bottom of the kettle, but the sides of the kettle probably aren't going to be significantly hotter than the wort.

coryforsenate said:

Use a fine nylon bag to put them in. For each time point during the boil, just pick the bag up, open it, and add more hops. Works for leaf and pellet hops.

Austinhomebrew sells them for like $4.

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I use this also, they are great. I put a couple marbles in it so that it does not float to the surface.

i used the paint strainer on the last batch but i put it on the fermenation bucket, dump the wort and the bag caught the hop pellets then removed from bucket.

so do you sparge the hops in the bag with cold water?

jamiecady said:

so do you sparge the hops in the bag with cold water?

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The hops (bagged or not) go into the boil, not the sparge. If you're adding cold water to top up the fermenter in an extract brew, I guess you could keep the hops in the bag when you add the water but I don't see any advantage to doing that. Just making more of a sludge-y mess.

yeah I'm doing extract brews, and will be doing a whole leaf brew. I have recently built a setup like this and just wondering what you do about getting all the wort that the whole leaf hops soak up out of them?