messy hops!

[bazooka]

....it took me about an hour to rack my beer to a carboy due to all the mess from the hop pellets that got stuck in the hose. The guy at the local brew shop told me to go ahead and just throw all the pellets into the boiling wort, as they would settle, and remain on the bottom! This was not the case, as I could see all the chunky bits going through the hose, and they kept clogging up the flow. Anyway, I finally got all the beer into the carboy (minus the last inch or so), but now I'm worried I will have the same problem when I'm racking back into the primary just before bottling. Should I put some sort of filter or cloth on the end of the hose? Any advice would help.

[toneyc]

That is the method I use, I put the hop pellets straight into the brewpot and then pour it all into my fermenter after it is cool. The hops do settle to the bottom. Maybe there was still a lot of fermentation going on that stirred up the trub? Or did it get disturbed when you moved it to the counter top to rack to the carboy? I usually try to move my primary to the racking location at least a couple of hours ahead of time to give it a chance to settle a bit before racking. And did you have that little cap thingie on the end of the racking cane? That helps a bit, too. And I put my racking cane all the way to the bottom and then retract it about 2 or 3 inches to minimize pulling the trub off the bottom then be as careful as I can when it gets down to that level to maintain a balance between the level of the beer and the proximity of the trub. Don't dispair!

:)
Toney.

[paul84043]

Are you using a racking cane like the autosiphon? Or just a hose?
The autosiphon is worth it's weight in gold....very cool little device.

[ray m]

Don't your homebrew shops sell those little muslin cloth bags?? I use them all the time and they really minimize the amount of hop crap that gets into the brew. But if you don't have those, Toney has a good method with using the little racking cane tip. That helps too. When I bottle, racking from the secondary, I siphon using the racking cane tip, then I let the draining beer empty into one of those huge 12 inch plastic funnels with a fine mesh screen that fits into the groove of the funnel. This set up really helps me strain a lot of crap out of my brews, especially a dry-hopped pale ale.