It had been so long since I last used loose pellets in my kettle that I forgot how much of a pain in the backside it can be to cast-out clear wort. I do not care how long one whirlpools one’s wort. It is still not as clear as wort produced using whole cones and a false bottom or pellets and a spider. Luckily, I pitched 1469, so I the batch could be top-cropped; otherwise, I would have had drop the wort to separate the trub from the fermenting wort to get a high cell count crop. The cast-wort looked like incompletely stirred Swiss mix.
I’ve noticed when I whirlpool I get a great hop cone but the pump also chews up the hops it does intake into micro-bits which does make the recirculating wort cloudy. I use my HERMS coil to cool my wort so whirlpool is integral to my process.
However, simply letting the wort sit a few minutes prior to transfer gives me great clarity. This is easily demonstrated by taking a hydro sample and allowing the trüb to settle.
Even after settling, when I open the valve to drain the kettle I get an initial slog of cloudy wort then it quickly transitions to crystal clear wort. I just count that as the cost of doing business and figure that’s what the collection cone in the fermenter is for.
Cleaning a spider was relegated to the PITA category and is now on the unused HomeBrew equipment heap.
I don’t worry about cloudy wort. It settles very well in the fermenter, and the beer ends up perfectly clear. (Until I chill it, but that’s another subject.)
There is no need to fear cloudy wort going into the fermenter. It in no way effects the clarity of the beer in the end. A brewer in my local club simply dumps the entire contents of the boil kettle into the fermenter and his beer turns out just fine. I refuse to go that far and do take steps to keep the trub out of the fermenter but occasionally things just don’t settle out and I have noticed no clarity issues between those cloudy batches vs clear transferred batches.
Don’t tell me what to do 
Just say “no” to pellets. That is our approach, works every time.
And chill haze was mentioned above. With our technique of wort chilling, until the full cold break is developed, we alleviate this problem. The proteins and break material are filtered out while the chilled wort passes through the whole cone hop filter bed.
We have a final catch all filter at the fermenter, to get anything that makes it through the hop bed filter. This results in brilliant, crystal clear wort.
Good beer, clear beer, that tastes great.
Yes…I know, it does not make any difference. But this is how we chose to brew.
I use nothing but pellets added loose and have no problems. It may come down to differences in equipment and process. Most commercial breweries use pellets, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with them.
Maybe the process has something to do with it.
I do BIAB, dump the loose hop pellets in and stir. After the hour boil and cooling, I drain the pot into the fermenter through the spigot under the influence of gravity.
To me worrying about residue from freely swimming hop pellets, seems like trying to “invent” a problem so one can find a solution to it. I’ve sometimes put every ounce of liquid and hop debris from the boil pot into the fermenter and still fermented good, clear beer that tasted great.
Well said
That is what happened to me. However, I waited 45 minutes after whirlpooling with my chiller and then spinning the wort for a few minutes after I removed the chiller and the wort never cleared. It remained murky during the entire cast-out. The was a bit of a hop cone in the middle after the kettle drained, but I am never going to use pellets loose without some way to filter the wort afterwards. I know that a lot of brewer prefer pellets, but I only use pellets out of necessity. I switched to a cloth bag spider after having a stainless steel mesh spider clog with pellets. The bag swims in the wort, so it is does not get clogged with break as badly as a stationary tight-mesh stainless spider.
I use the 1520 micron spider shown below that I special ordered from Arbor Fab for whole cones. A 1520 micro mesh spider has 1.52mm (0.060") holes. That is perfect size mesh for a whole cone spider. Wort boils right through it. Cleanup is trivial compared to a tight-mesh pellet spider. It only requires a garden hose with a spray nozzle. It is not as nice as false bottom, but most of the Chinese-manufactured kettles being sold today are far enough out of round from top to bottom that it is difficult to get a false bottom that has less than a 1/16th of an gap between the false bottom and the kettle. Additionally a kettle false bottom needs more space between bottom of the kettle and the false bottom than in a mash tun setup to prevent super heating of the wort below the false bottom.
If one repitches, one does not want a half inch or more of trub in the bottom of one’s fermentation vessel, that is, unless one is using a true top-cropping culture. A little break is okay, but a half inch of trub is too much to deal with in an expedient way when bottom cropping. It is better to find a way to hold back the hops and most of break than to attempt to separate yeast from the trub post-fermentation.
What that said, a good thing about Wyeast 1469 is that it brings a lot of break and hops to the top with brown head, so skimming the brown head before taking a creamy yeast head allows one to remove a lot of that extraneous material from the ferment. Another way to do it is to use the double-drop system used by Breakspear. The wort is allowed to ferment for around 16 hours before being dropped into another fermentation vessel, leaving the break and particulate matter behind while adding oxygen to the ferment.
Quoting Saccharomyces: “If one repitches, one does not want a half inch or more of trub in the bottom of one’s fermentation vessel, that is, unless one is using true top-cropping culture.” Yes, very often the various parts of the process are inter-related. It seems to me there are very few firm answers to brewing questions - it’s always “It depends…”
+1 – I have no problems at all using pellets either in a 6 gallon system a 620 gallon system. Clear wort/no problems. Expect at least a 10% loss in utilization if bagging. You will also most likely lose more wort due to absorption.
I use a large false bottom that is the full diameter of my keggle. I had always used whole hops and sometimes a few pellets. My thought was can’t use pellets alone in my system. I recently brewed a Bo Pils and could only get Saaz hops in pellet so I said I’ll try it. I had won a SS mesh basket in a comp and tried it first. I don’t know the micron size but it was probably 300. I didn’t like it and took it out and let the hops go free in the BK. So I ended up using the basket in the fermenter pumping the wort from the inside through the basket. This worked great, I got no hop material into the fermenter and a well aeriated wort as a bonus.
To the OP, you might try this method with a smaller micron basket. I’m not sure what your BK is like but Jaybird has some nice FB options, that’s where I got mine. I now have more options with hops.
Prost, Mike.
Hop pellets settle out to the bottom with the trub. A quick WP and a 5-10 minute rest is all you need. Just no reason to filter out pellets-- UNLESS – (and it’s a big unless!)you use one of those small homebrew plate chillers. Those will clog. On professional HEX clogging is much less of a problem but does happen, especially with excessive hops.
I too switched almost entirely to pellets some years back because of availability and storage issues. I simply put then in a large muslin bag and suspend them in the boil kettle. The only time I use cones is for my IPA for FWH and late additions (won’t screw with the recipe under threats of death from my wife). I use pellets for the bittering addition and don’t use a bag when brewing this beer as the whole hops will filter out almost all of the pellet debris. Full disclosure, I do not whirlpool since I have a false bottom in my kettle and draw out the wort from the center of the keggle kettle when chilling. I am considering changing that.
I also have an inline screen ahead of my pump and plate chiller that captures any wayward pellet pieces that make it out of the kettle. The beer always comes out fine. 1.5" Tri Clamp Compatible Strainer with 3" OD Body from Brewers Hardware
Ironically we had a discussion yesterday after our judging session at a local competition. One of the guys swears that whole cones hops make a better beer because the lupulin glands are not crushed like they are when the hops are pelletized and cited the fact that Sierra Nevada uses whole cone hops in their beers. I didn’t argue against his reasoning but have never really noticed any difference between using cones or pellets.
I totally agree with the blichman chiller clogging easily. I add the pellets loose, but I also whirlpool, then chill to almost ground water temps with a Hearts counterflow chiller also whirl-pooling as it re enters the kettle. This settles everything enough that I can run it through the plate chiller using ice water to get the wort to pitching temps. Where I live in Florida the ground water rarely gets below 72F.
There are trade-offs associated with every brewing process. A 10% hop utilization loss is no big deal, especially when it makes yeast cropping much simpler. Brewers with conicals can drop the true before cropping. I do not own a conical.
As far as to wort loss, you lost me on that one. Bagged hops can be drained, not so with loose hops.
I have a 300 micron mash hop spider. That is just too fine for brewing, period. I clogs up with break.
It used to be easy to find a false bottom that fit a kettle well when brewing kettles were made Vollrath and Polarware stock pots. Those stock pots were more universally round than Chinese manufacture stock pots. Every kettle I have purchased that was made from a Chinese stock pot is out of round enough that making a small gap false bottom is a pot-to-pot ordeal. To make matters worse, the kettles with riveted handles tend to be wider from handle to handle and narrower at 90 degrees from the handle by as much as an eigth of an inch. Kegs are more uniformly round.
We are just going to have to agree to disagree. I have yet to see a batch of wort where pellets were used loose that is clear as one where whole cones and a false bottom or pellets and hop spider was used. I have never had to turn the valve in my Brew Bucket or DBS 4-gallon fermentation vessel to lift the pickup tube out of a mass of trub. In fact, I thought that was a gimmick until this batch.
If you are whirlpooling, you are not using a RipTide pump because my experience with the pump impeller shredding the hops parallels Using a pump and whirlpool attachment just made matters worse.