Yes, Arbor Fab will make a spider with any size mesh up 1520 micron. However, there is an upcharge. I do not know who thought 300 and 400 micron were a good mesh size for pellets, but that person was clearly not a brewer. One does not need to hold back the powder. One needs to hold back the larger particulate matter.
I use hop bags. I have a Blichmann plate cooler and I don’t want it to clog. But as many brewers have stated, you’ll have to adjust your hop utilization factor just a bit. Cleanup is easy; just toss it in the trash!!
I’ve been using hop bags with my plate cooler for roughly 7 years and about 80 batches with no issues.
From what I can find 300, 400, 800 are readily available, with 300 being by far the most used.
Here is a 800 micron.
Old thread, but I just wanted to comment that I have not found my spider difficult to clean. When I break down all of the BK equipment I toss all the hardware into an old bottling bucket with hot water and PBW. I rinse the gunk off the spider and toss that in too. Never had brown gunk build up.
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I find the spider easier to clean than the hop bags
when I bagged hops, I used 50 cent disposable muslin bags. No cleaning required
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That is a great idea. I always used the nylon bags until I got my spider.
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Since I cannot whirlpool with my current kettle setup that has a false bottom and draws from the center of the kettle, I use a large Brew In a Bag mesh bag to hold my pellet hops. It works well. In addition, I also have an inline strainer between my pump a and plate chiller to capture any stray hops that might make it out of the kettle. When I use a mixture of pellets and cones in my IPA’s, I just throw them in and the strainer captures the pellet residue before it gets to the plate chiller.