Removing hops after flameout

This hobby is great! I get to work all day and secretly think about brewing while getting paid at the same time! The down side is, I come up with a lot of random thoughts and now I'm looking for some opinions.

As I've stated many times before, I brew 3 gallon AG batches and I seem to loose quite a bit of wort to hop sludge after cooling my wort to pitching temps. I've thought of using hop bags to contain the pellets but I know that can lead to a reduction in utilization (I also know that I can boil a few minutes longer to regain said utilization) but I was thinking of an easier solution.

What do you think if I used a cone shaped mesh colander after knockout to remove as much of the solids as possible and cooling only after I am able to retain as much liquid as possible? Infection concerns (which I've never really been concerned about) would not be an issue because the wort would be just below boiling temperature and I should be able to collect a fair bit of hop residue... Thoughts please?

why not just whirlpool your wort in the pot, let settle for 10 mins and then syphon out the wort from the side?

A bag won't hold the pellets...they dissolve too easily into dustlike particles.

I use a nylon net (local HB Store) on top of the primary and pour my woth through it to separate my hops. Be sure to use 6 clothes pins to hold it on. The weight of the water will make it fall into the bucket. Then I sparge (rinse) them with top off water.

It depends on the bag. If you get a tight weave nylon hop bag (not muslin), it traps all the pellet sludge. In fact, once you remove it, you end up with a "snowball" of hop particals inside the bag.

is there a problem with boiling a nylon hop bag? Give you anything bad in the beer?

Nah, if anything came out of the bag itself, it wouldn't be so reusable. It's not breaking down on me or anything. The fact that they're sold for this purpose suggests there's no problem.

Bobby_M said:

Nah, if anything came out of the bag itself, it wouldn't be so reusable. It's not breaking down on me or anything. The fact that they're sold for this purpose suggests there's no problem.

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Ok, I ask because I was at the LHBS the other night and I was looking at those. I will be building something to hold the bag in the brew pot (like the one I have seen here using pvc and threaded rod) and I asked the kid working there if those bags can be boiled and he did not know. But he's the new guy there and is about as new to brewing as I am.
I was also thinking of putting one of thos bags over the manifold in my MLT to help get my runnings cleaner. What do you think of that?

I use 3 1/2" S/S tea balls.

Putting pellets in the 60 minute addition is useless - almost nothing left in the tea ball.

The 30 min and 15 min (or less) works great. There is a lot of hop residue left in the tea balls.

I can tell which one is 30 vs. 15 by what is left.

www.kitchenfantasy.com has them at a great price if you buy 6.

The tea ball sounds like a great way to go. Thanks!

The only problem I've had with nylon bags was the time one melted to the bottom of the kettle. Probably changed the flavor a bit, but fortunately it was a stout.

You definitely don't want hop bags sitting on the bottom of the kettle. I just use a binder clip to hold it up in the column of wort at least 3 inches off the bottom.

I wouldn't use a hop bag on a manifold to make runnings clear. That's what vorlaufing is all about, using the existing bed of husks as a filter.