Do commercial breweries use hop bags with pellets?

[Finlandbrews]

Do commercial breweries use hop bags when using pellets? If you know any who just throws in the pellets in kettle or one that always puts their pellets in hop bags, let me know their names.

The reason I ask this is as I was wondering how much hop material in my primary fermenter can affect flavors or yeast health/growth negatively and how should I proceed to avoid hop material in my fermenter... But maybe it is not a problem, anyone knows?

 

[Ramitt]

I have heard at least one brewer on The Session mentioning using bags. Thing is with smaller craft brewers are pretty near using the same technic homebrewers are, tbe bigger guys obviously not so much.

 

[thehopbine]

My experience with commercial brewing...nobody uses bags for pellets. Only time I've seen bags used is for whole cones/wet hops, and that was to only prevent equipment from clogging and creating headaches. As far as your problem is concerned with hop material affecting your beer I don't quite see a huge issue with that. However it can hurt clarity with all the particulate floating around. Next time try a quick whirlpool with some kettle fining agents like Irish moss or whirlfloc, and siphon off the top of your settled material.

 

[zmanzorro]

I've brewed with a few local breweries and neither of them use bags for pellets. They just dump the hops straight in and whirlpool out the sediment later.

 

[redllama]

At our brewery (7bbl system) we use a custom hop basket for bittering and other early additions. For late additions we just dump them in the kettle. We found that with our IPA that even though we were whirlpooling we still got a decent amount of hops that were getting into and clogging the heat exchanger. The new process has helped quite a bit and increased our yield.