anybody with a gravity system actually try this? i was all excited to make one before this thread but now I'm questioning if i should even bother.
I tried both methods, with a pump and gravity. It worked fine with gravity until it was exposed to air and lost siphon.i would be interesting to see if it would work with just gravity
I have a CFC and the whole point of the CFC was to rapidly chill 10 gallons of wort in-line to the fermenter. Having to slow the flow down to a trickle when the mesh becomes exposed to air effectively defeats the purpose.
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However, if the whole point of CFC / plate chiller is speed, I'm not sure I want to spend another $160 on a pump to help me squeeze those last 2 gallons out, but not increase speed.
Here's the ***** of it: a non-positive-displacement pump such as the March or Chugger will only make the issues with the hop blocker much more aggravating, because that kind of pump can't maintain any suction once the impeller cavitates, which will happen as soon as the flow gets restricted (ala those last couple of gallons).
At that point you'll have no flow from the kettle and you'll have a pump screaming bloody murder at you.
Fun times...
Cheers!
What about creating a hop spider with using this stainless mesh? My problem with the spiders are that they use a material that absorbs liquid and could possibly be absorbing more of the hop oils than desired.
The last two times I used a hop bag, I lost a significant amount of hop character which is why I am so interested in this method.
Maybe this is the best of both worlds?
That's been done, and you can find at least a couple of threads covering spiders using stainless mesh in this forum.
As for the loss of character, I doubt it had anything to do with the material of the hop bag. More likely it was due to the lower utilization that is pretty typical of hops constrained in a nylon bag verses allowing them to free-swim in the wort...
Cheers!
What about creating a hop spider with using this stainless mesh?
I don't want to deal with the pump issues everyone is having and I'd eventually like to get to something more elegant than the hop spider.
It seems to me like this is the best solution I've found so far. Pretty expensive and requires a tri-clover fitting, but seems to be the ultimate solution.
http://www.brewershardware.com/FILTER1-Testing.html
i like that filter too but i can't imagine it would work with out a pump.
Here's the ***** of it: a non-positive-displacement pump such as the March or Chugger will only make the issues with the hop blocker much more aggravating, because that kind of pump can't maintain any suction once the impeller cavitates, which will happen as soon as the flow gets restricted (ala those last couple of gallons).
At that point you'll have no flow from the kettle and you'll have a pump screaming bloody murder at you.
Fun times...
Cheers!
how do you keep the inside of your boil kettle so clean and shiny? i scrub the cr@p out of my keggle and it wont ever come up like that.
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