I measured the losses from my two brews this weekend (12 gal of dopplebock and 12gal of black IPA), using a Blichmann Hop Blocker. on the first, dopple, I lost just under half gallon. on the IPA, the hop sludge seemed to ‘strand’ a bunch of wort, and i wound up loosing about .75 - 7/8 of a gallon of wort.
Bear in mind this is the liquid that is separate from the hop sludge - not much to speak of on the doppel and a whole fat disk in the center of the kettle on the ipa.
I shop vac’ed the actual available liquid to do the measurements.
That doesn’t seem like a huge amount to me, maybe 5-7% loss in the kettle. You can try to get that down if you want, but I wouldn’t bother unless I had nothing else to worry about
I’m not sure what the point of that u-bend is or how you would use it.
I’m not sure how this measures up to a whirlpool technique, but it’s probably not as efficient. Although, as Tom indicated, it’s not so bad that I would try to minimize it. Instead, I would focus my efforts on a more qualitative measure to improve my beer. Now if I were in production, it would be a different story, but for homebrewing it seems adequate.
