Is there any relation between crush and the amount of break material generated?
My LHBS has a very fine crush. Which is nice because I get great efficiency with it. But I tend to get loads of hot and cold break, usually the bottom 3 inches of my 10 gallon kettle post chilling. You can whirlpool until you’re blue in the face but its too much to get into a cone. Re my process I use whirlfloc at 15 mins, IC typically to 64ish degrees, the attempt a whirpool and let it settle 15 or so minutes before transferring.
Thoughts? I really don’t mind SOME break material going into my fermenter, but what I’m getting now is just too much and I don’t really want to go to an 8 or 8.5 gallon boil to get 5.5 into my carboys.
I use a paint strainer bag and a big funnel…I have several pre-sanitized because it usually takes more than one as there’s so much gunk in them. It’s not a real solution, it just keeps some of the material out of the fermenter. You’ll still get a lot of the fine stuff passing through.
Are you performing a good vorleuf when you drain the first runnings and sparge to set the grain bed to do most of the filtering. I try to vorleuf until i get nice clear runnings before going into the kettle. I have also begun using hop bags for all my additions and now my kettle drains much easier and my beer is much clearer
going into the primary leaving almost no break material.
[quote]Are you performing a good vorleuf when you drain the first runnings and sparge to set the grain bed to do most of the filtering. I try to vorleuf until i get nice clear runnings before going into the kettle. I have also begun using hop bags for all my additions and now my kettle drains much easier and my beer is much clearer
going into the primary leaving almost no break material.
[/quote]
I do (at least I feel I do) a good vorlouf, usually 6 quarts, until the wort is running nice and clear. I also always use hop sacks.