Full Boil new Pot questions

After getting the first batch into the primary I got to thinking (dangerous). So I acquired a keg and had a friend plasma the top and weld on stainless fittings. Now searching these forums have been very educational except I have been left a little confused about keggles and extract brewing. Here goes:

How to get the wort through the spigot and cooled for pitching...I know that there are many suggestions and tools like hops bags and hop screens and such but I keep reading that hops bags are not good with pellet hops and screens dont work with cold break if I use an IC. Can I not use an immersion chiller and a screen if I use a hops bag? Or is the cold break too much and I will have to use a counter flow?

I wanted to go with the keggle as I foresee all grain brewing in my future and a pot that large and in SS would caust a fortune with the custom fittings attached.

If I have posted this in the wrong area please advise thanks!

I use a 5 gallon paint strainer bag as a hop bag (nothing else) and haven't had any problems with hop utilization or clogging the output spigot on my brew kettle.

I let everything else just go into the fermenter. You can always whirlpool the rest of it, though. I've heard that works well.

mojotele said:

I use a 5 gallon paint strainer bag as a hop bag (nothing else) and haven't had any problems with hop utilization or clogging the output spigot on my brew kettle.

I let everything else just go into the fermenter. You can always whirlpool the rest of it, though. I've heard that works well.

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+1 for letting everything go into the fermenter.

I think too much is made of filtering out hot break before racking wort to the primary. Unless you are using a CFC of plate chiller where clogging is a concern, I don't think it is worth the hassel. Do a little whirlpool if you want and then don't worry beyond that. I am a big fan of listening to anything that Jamil says, and he says not to worry about it. At least not with Ales. Since I brew Ales almost exclusively, I don't really worry to much about hot/cold break getting into the fermenter.

So what type of chilling do you guys do? Then what kind of filter to keep the crud out of the siphon tube?

I use a homemade IC and it works great. 25 feet for 5 gallon batches and I can drop the wort down to 100 degrees in under 5 minutes. Again on Jamil's advice, I decided not to go to a plate chiller or CFC because of the increased risk of DMS from them. Because when using those most of the Wort just sits in the pot hot, there is apparently an increased risk of DMS production. What I really want to do is make a Whirlpool IC like Jamil uses, but I can't afford the March pump right now.

I haven't had a problem with any of the tubing getting clogged. I use pellet hops so the particles are normally pretty small, and I use 3/8 ID tubing off the ball valve on my pot so it is wide enough. By the time I rack out of Primary all of the break material has fallen out of suspension so clogging of the siphon tube is not a problem either.

So the sediment from the cold break and the pellet hops does not clog your siphon? Are you also using a keggle?

My last batch I poured through a filtered funnel and it was clogged instantly. I had to pour and scrape then dump and repeat until all of the wort got into the carboy. That much sediment would not clog a 3/8 tube?

correct, I brewed on Sunday and my procedure after boil was as follows.
1) chill down to 80 degrees with IC
2) attached sanitized hose barb with 3/8 ID tubing to ball valve in kettle (8 gallon megapot)
3) Open ball valve and drain contents of kettle, with break material directly into fermenter.
4) Aerate fermenter with aquarium pump for 30 minutes while wort cools to pitching temp
5) pitch yeast.

I had no problem with break material clogging the tubing. A fine mesh screen is pretty easy to clog so I can see why your strainer got clogged up. A 3/8 tube on the other hand is a pretty decent size opening and the hop pellet particles moved through it with no problem. I brewed an APA with about 1.5 oz of hops in the boil. Maybe with a lot more hops there would be a problem, but form what I saw I don't think so.

Excellent info.. So a hops bag added will greatly reduce gunk and then let the cold break drain on into the carboy.

I am not going to tell you not to use a hop bag if you want to, but I don't use one. I don't like to do anything that MIGHT reduce hop utilization. I just throw the hop pellets in there and let all that stuff go into the fermenter. But, a lot of people use hop bags, and they get great results so using one is definitely not a bad thing. I just don't use one.

So, if you are going to use a hop bag, yeah it will significantly reduce the amount of hop matter that is in the wort, and then just drain all of it into the fermenter and you should be good.

Note: if you are going to do a lager, then you might want to consider other ways to remove break material. But for ales, you will be fine this way.

Thanks for all the info BBB.

I used to use the mesh strainer on the funnel, and, like it does for you, it would get clogged constantly. I eventually got fed up with it and just stopped bothering as I never noticed a difference in taste between those I strained and those I didn't.

I just use my hop bag and the rest just flows out of the kettle and in the fermenter. I only use the hop bag because the hop sludge seems to clump a lot more and clog up airlocks on active fermentations. Keep in mind that I don't use an ordinary hop bag, though. The 5 gallon paint strainer bags are much larger than your typical hop bag and allow the hops to move a lot more freely in the boiling wort. There's a bunch of threads on using them for this purpose.

I think whole hops are much more likely to clog your valve than pellet hops and/or break materials.

Thanks Mojotele I will get myself a paint strainer

I use a 25foot CFC chiller between my keggle and fermenter. will gravity feed a 10gal batch down to 70deg in about 15min (still don't have a pump)