Best way to keep hot break and hops out of the plate chiller and fermentor ?

[McKnuckle]

Cold break only manifests itself as a haze in chilled wort.

This is an interesting conversation. I am curious about the quoted statement, though. If cold break is only seen as haze in chilled wort, then what are the fluffy clumps that show up only once the wort is chilled in the kettle? And then they float down and settle, albeit not always tightly, in whatever vessel the wort is transferred to. The effect is familiar to any home brewer and is not subtle.

This is not haze, and I've always called it "cold break." I skim out the hot break FWIW.

 

[Vale71]

You can't "skim out" the hot break either unlike you subscribe to the misconception that hot break equals the foamy mess that floats on top of the boiling wort. While that is indeed hot break material it is only a small part of it, the rest is happily floating around and coalescing as boil progresses. You can clearly see it (at best when brewing something pale in color) if you ladle some boiling wort into a transparent container. The flakes you'll see swimming around in the wort and slowly settling to the bottom are made of hot break material.

Long story short, what you see in your wort either before or after chilling is 100% hot break material, the only difference is whether you separate it prior to chilling (f.e. via a whirlpool) or after chilling.

 

[Vale71]

This is the only serious resource I've been able to find online. Skip to page 28 if you're just interested in the hot/cold trub issue.

http://www.craftbrewersconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2015_presentations/W1440_Burghard_Meyer.pdf

 

[duncan.brown]

I did an experiment with my last brew and attached a large sight glass to the bottom of my unitank. I use a Hop Stopper 2 in the boil kettle to filter out hop material, pump the wort through a plate chiller (which gets it down to 50F in one pass this time of year) and directly into my unitank. I don't recurculate in the kettle. I set the tank's racking arm sideways to get a bit of a whirlpool going. After about an hour, the sight glass is full of coagulated material (see first picture). Another 30 mins later, it has settled further and you can see clear wort at the top of the sight glass.

Based on the settling rate and the particle size in the presentation @Vale71 linked above, this has to be hot break that made it through the Hop Stopper and hop material, rather than cold break.

One day, I might try an experiment and pump wort through a 1 micron filter before it goes into the fermenter and see if that has any impact on one of my light lagers.

 

[Vale71]

It'll certainly have an impact on the filter, like it will be completely clogged in no time. Hot break is really quite a lot of stuff for a filter to be effective and not rapidly become completely clogged, that's why centrifugal systems (be it a classic whirlpool or an actual centrifuge) have quickly become the norm in the industry.

 

[duncan.brown]

It'll certainly have an impact on the filter, like it will be completely clogged in no time.

Yes, if I do this then I think I'll need a whirlpool and two-stage filter to get rid of the coarser hot-break material before trying to get the cold break out.

I would be curious if anyone has tried to filter cold break on the home-brew scale. If anyone has a centrifuge in the basement, I will be quite impressed.

 

[Vale71]

If anyone has a centrifuge in the basement, I will be quite impressed.

So will the neighbors. A high-speed centrifuge sounds like a jet liner about to take off, which it will actually do if improperly anchored...