I brewed another beer last night and tested out a new (to me) concept - post boil straining. It seemed to work really well.
I brewed normally, without a hop filter in the kettle. I used pellet hops. At the end of the boil I put a BIAB bag into the kettle. Then I recirculated back into the BIAB bag in the kettle for a bit.
Once I was pretty sure I had strained out the hop material and hot break, I connected the chiller and recirculated hot wort through it, back into the BIAB bag. This sterilized the chiller.
Once the chiller was sterilized, I turned on the chilling water while continuing to circulate back into the BIAB bag in the kettle. I think this caught some of the cold break.
At some point I diverted the chiller output from the kettle into the fermentor.
It seemed to work really well. The bag caught a lot of debris. The pump had zero problems because it had no inlet restriction. The chiller didn't plug because I had filtered out most of the debris from the wort. And the wort that went to the fermentor was pretty clean.
The one concern I have is that the wort sits pretty still while all this is going on. DMS could build up. But I could also bring it back to a boil again after straining too.
If I had a counterflow tube chiller instead of a plate chiller I could immediately start recirculating through the chiller and save about 10 minutes of straining before I circulate through the plate chiller. This would speed up my brew day and also cut down on the DMS prone time. Hmmm....
I'm going to try this again on my next batch.
Here the wort is recirculating through the chiller back into the BIAB bag.
This is what the bag caught. The bottom of the kettle was almost perfectly clean.