Ferm to Keg Filtering Assistance

[Stonehenge360]

TLDR;

Have a CF-5 with temp and O2 control
All beer is going into kegs
Don't want to dry hop in a bag for oxygen reasons
Already cold crashing but not totally effective
Keg posts plugging up with dry hop material
Filter unit didn't fill properly and bubbled air thru the beer the whole time
Any ideas would be truly appreciated.


The setup:

I have a Spike CF-5 with full temp control and racking arm. NEIPA is a favorite style of mine, so I am as close to oxygen free as I can get (not really insterested in an O2 discussion argument here...I have chosen my low O2 path and am happy with my decision). I purge fermentation CO2 thru a clean keg, and rack under pressure, and have very good success with the stability of my NEIPAs. To achieve this , I dry hop between 6 and 10oz per 5 gal batch under positive pressure. I have a 1.5: TC "tee" on the top of my CF-5 with the spike pressure manifold "sideways" and the top vertical part of the 'tee' capped. When I want to DH, I turn on bottle CO2 to 3psi, and open the top cap on the 'tee' to add the dry hops commando. They drop straight into the beer, and then I quickly cap the top of the 'tee' and reinstall my blowoff assembly. I dry hop at 60F after a 2 day soft crash to 50F. Tee sits ontop of my conical like this:


This system is relatively new to me. I have been building it over the last 6 months, and I am happy with everything except the transfers of my NEIPAs.

Even though I do a 50F soft crash, 60F dryhop, and then a 3 day 33F cold crash, I am not able to get all the hops to drop to the bottom, and my transfers are a nightmare. The hops almost always clog the keg poppit, and I end up having to purge with CO2 and sometimes disassemble the poppit to clear the hop material, which is undoing all the hard work I did keeping O2 to a minimum.

With 6-10 oz of DH, the racking arm is basically useless. As far as I can tell, there are hops in all directions, and rotating the arm doesn't help me at all. I don't know how to cold crash "better" than I am already doing. The cold crashing doesn't seem to give hop free beer. I am strongly against using a hop bag. I dry hop at the end of fermentation for very specific reasons, which doesn't allow for yeast to clean up the DH O2. I also have the cooling coil installed, so dry hopping in a bag would require me to open the 4" TC and pull the coil completely out, leading to an unacceptable addition of oxygen to the system.

I purchased a 1.5" TC filter unit recently, thinking I could simply filter out the hops during transfer before the got to the keg. It looks like this:


I tried this today with very little success. The filter was attached to my racking arm at the normal 30 degree angle that the racking arm sits at. The filter never filled completely, and the beer, although filtering, bubbled through the whole system, exposing it to an unbelievable amount of oxygen. (luckily I ran this test on a non-NEIPA with only 2 oz of dry hop so the oxygen exposure shouldn't cause too many problems)

Basically, I am ready to return this filter contraption, remove the center popit from my ball-lock fitting and just deal with the clogs. I am hoping someone out there runs a system similar to mine and can help me with this.

If anyone uses one of these filters successfully, how to you purge the filter of air and get the beer to flow without bubbling and mixing with air?

 

[ITV]

I use a similar filter with a bazooka screen. They way I purge it is to unscrew my ball lock connector and crack open the racking valve and fill my hydrameter flask which purges out the air and prefills the filler hose with beer. I then screw back on the ball lock connector and start filling my keg.

I do not use a racking arm on my CF10. I attached a short hose to my dump port (2"TC to ball lock adapter) and open the dump valve until clear beer start to come out. Then I do the same to the racking port to get rid of sediment that settles in the racking port due to the downward angle.