I am new to homebrewing and have a quick question which I have not been able to find a good answer for.
I have an otherwise good brew (hit all the marks, tastes good) chilling (literally) in my closet. I brewed without any finings. After primary racked and dry hopped with pellets. They have broken apart over the past week and now I can see a billion hop particles floating around.
I don’t mind the haze, and I don’t mind some bottle traub. What I don’t want is a crap load of hops leaf in every mouthful.
I have some mesh bags that would catch bigger particles but let yeast pass. I was thinking about boiling, soaking in my starsan solutions and then putting on the end of my siphon hose when racking to bottling bucket.
I brew exclusively with pellets and they always drop out after a few days of cold crashing (~2°C). If that doesn’t get it where you want, try fining - my recommendation would be BioFine Clear at 1 mL/gal.
i dont think it is necessary to strain. everything should settle a few weeks at near freezing temp or with finnings. however, if you really wanted to preclude this you could make a makeshift filter out of sanitized cotton sponge, or even the grain bag. and put it inside the bottleing tubing at the spigot. this way there would be no real chance for oxidation. however if there is much particulate this would clog quite quickly i would think
Another option is to line your bottling bucket with a paint strainer bag. Rack as usual and then gently (and gently is key as you don’t want oxidation) lift the bag out of the bucket taking the particles with it.
And if you don’t want to wait it out at all, just filter it as you serve it by pouring through some cheese cloth into the pitcher or glass. I have seen that done with very old and rare wines.
What I found was that the black cap on my auto-siphon racking cane did a good job at blocking most of the bigger flakes of hops. Those that made it thru stayed at the bottom of my bottling bucket below the spigot line. And the very few that floated up didn’t make it past the tip of my bottle filler. Crisis averted.
Stupid me didn’t do a great job stirring the bottling sugar into the beer so once I got about 35 bottles in I could see excess syrup flowing into my bottles. I guess some will be more carbonated than others. C’est La vie. My motto (for now) is flat beer and flat women are still beer and women… everything else is just a bonus!
Might want to separate out those last bottles. If things were so uneven that you could see the excess priming sugar, they’ll be in danger of getting way overcarbonated. Possilbly to the point of becoming bottle bombs.
