Hop sludge when transferring wort—what to do?

[Queequeg]

This likely has nothing to do with your bottle gushers unless you get hop pellet trub in the bottles providing nucleation sites, and I'd be skeptical of even that.

Also, I'd like to know how pellet hops had an effect on your brewhouse efficiency, unless you were so worried about trub in the fermenter that you left too much wort behind in the kettle?

both your assumptions are correct

 

[thekraken]

I use whirlfoc tablets when I brew. Usually I dump everything in the fermenter and forget about it and there will be all those crazy weird clouds of break material floating around the carboy for a few hours.

I posted earlier in the thread how I used a fine mesh bag to filter out the hops as it was going into my fermenter in order to free up a little head room. I used some whirlfloc as usual this time too, after I finished chilling the crazy clouds were floating around in my kettle like normal. After straining my wort through the mesh bag and removing the bag, there was no break material visible in the carboy like there usually is, the wort was as clear in the fermenter as I've ever seen it (pre-fermentation)... I don't know if the mesh bag just broke up those coagulated break clouds and forced them back into solution with the wort or if it mostly filtered out with the hop junk. Thoughts?

 

[burninator]

I use a strainer bag in my fermenting bucket. When the boil is done, and the wort is cool, I pour it in and strain out the hops.