I’m curious as to how well that thing works. It looks and sounds interesting! Please let us know once you use it and how you like it. That’s neat
I gave the WCIPA in the 6gal Torpedo keg equipped with a hopstopper keg edition a try when I got home from work today and decided it was time to push it into its serving keg.
To my relief, this went off without a hitch. I racked the beer over as slowly as my manifold would allow. When it was clear that I was going to get the fullest keg of dry hop beer I have ever managed, I decided to give it the beans, just to see if I could clog the filter. It ran at 20psi for about 15 seconds before it blew beer out the PRV.
I've killed the white whale, I've managed to overflow a keg with dry hopped beer.
With the transfer over, I realized that there was still a reasonable quantity of beer left in the 6gal keg. "Looks like I get to have a little treat tonight," I thought. I poured a pint off the 6gal keg...and that's when it struck me. This isn't like guzzling bonus beer off the bottom of the fermenter on kegging day. This beer is kegged! I can give it some gas and enjoy it for as long as it lasts. Neat!
Here's a picture of the pint that I drew off the dry hopping keg:
Stuff I
think I've learned, albeit after only one run on this rig--which means I'm a total expert:
1) Heavily hopped beers aren't very efficient, but the 6gal keg/hopstopper rig makes them more efficient on the cold side of the brewing process by limiting cold side losses to hop absorption and eliminating the limits imposed by a 5gal dry hopping keg. Hop absorption can't be helped, but given that the keg's spear needs to be kinked to accomodate the hopstopper when installed in a Torpedo Keg's domed bottom, that's a pretty big dead space, in keg terms. Maybe 2-3 pints? Still, it's a tangible gain over the other methods I've used. By using a 6gal keg, I blew dry hopped beer out of a PRV! That’s amazing!
2) Unfortunately, this rig sucks off the bottom of the dry hopping keg. I'm not sure how you don't lose some clarity with this method, unless you really cold crash your fermenter for a week or more. This beer was cold crashed at 38F for three days prior to transfer and turned into an unintentional NEIPA.
3) I made a mistake when I racked off the cold crashed fermenter by adding finings to the dry hopping keg. I did that partially out of habit, but I also figured that anything that I could fine in the dry hopping keg was material that didn't need to be fined in the serving keg. That's floating dip tube thinking. In retrospect, that was dumb. I think you're just wasting finings in the dry hopping keg. Unless you can get the hopstopper to float.... Yeah, I'm thinking about that.
4) Based upon my experience with the hopstopper kettle filter, I'm confident that the keg filter will work, going forward. This is, by far, the best dry hopping rig I've ever used.
5) The beer is wildly hoppy, both in flavor and aroma. I think having free-swimming hops makes a difference.
