Hop Clouds

Just finished brewing my third batch and noticed that after taking the wort off the boil and setting it in a ice bath to cool, the hops did not settle out but formed "clouds" that were suspended in the wort. I figured it had something to do with using irish moss and gypsum since this is the first batch I've used them. I pretty much ignored the coagulated mass of snot but it kept clogging up the siphon as I was transfering the wort to primary. Should I have any concerns with this?

joeyuwp said:

Just finished brewing my third batch and noticed that after taking the wort off the boil and setting it in a ice bath to cool, the hops did not settle out but formed "clouds" that were suspended in the wort. I figured it had something to do with using irish moss and gypsum since this is the first batch I've used them. I pretty much ignored the coagulated mass of snot but it kept clogging up the siphon as I was transfering the wort to primary. Should I have any concerns with this?

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I actually dont bother siphoning from the brew pot to the primary as you want to aerate it as much as possible anyway. so long as the wort is cool enough, you can quite happily pour it into the primary, and sometimes you can avoid draining the 'snot' into the primary as well....

joeyuwp said:

Just finished brewing my third batch and noticed that after taking the wort off the boil and setting it in a ice bath to cool, the hops did not settle out but formed "clouds" that were suspended in the wort. I figured it had something to do with using irish moss and gypsum since this is the first batch I've used them. I pretty much ignored the coagulated mass of snot but it kept clogging up the siphon as I was transfering the wort to primary. Should I have any concerns with this?

Click to expand...

No worries. You can try to pour easily to keep as much as the sludge out of your fermenter. Hell, you can dump it all, if you want. Your beer will clear faster, the cleaner it goes into the fermenter, but clarity really shouldn't be a huge deal to the beginning brewer, IMO.

The only case I can think of (other than clarity) where a clean transfer is really important is if you're going to do more than one batch on your yeast cake, to keep from cross contaminating with different hops.

THis past weekend, we didn't have any hop bags, so (for the first time) we just threw the hops into the wort. We tried draining the beer through the spigot at the bottom of the pot, but you can imagine how futile that became. Eventually, we just poured it into the carboy. However, I use a funnel that is equipped with a screen, so we easily filtered it all out.

Man, I went to brew with my budy and he was doing an IPA with about 5.5oz of hops. He didnt have anything to put them in. Needless to say, there was a lot of crap in the bottom of that beer.

As for the clouds, no worry. I boil my hops in a bag, and still get some of that. It really does not effect clarity too much in my experience. By the time to put it in the fermentor and then the secondary, the clarity issues seem to be more from yeast not hops.