Brewed a 5.5 gallon IPA with late addition pellet hops.
Immersion wort chilled to 62 degrees 1 hour after flame out.
Could only pour off 3 gallons of clear wort, the remaining wort
in the boil kettle was a mucky mess. I’m thinking of scrapping
late addition hops altogether…any ideas?
thanks
dr
Couple of ideas… Use a hop spider. Whirlpool. Don’t worry about trub getting into your fermenter. Cold crash. Use gelatin.
Been there, done that, many times. Here are some ideas:
Brew a larger batch, knowing that you’ll lose some wort to hop absorption. Alternately, come to peace with the lower yield for hoppy recipes.
Use an autosiphon or racking cane. Over the “out” part of the tubing, zip tie pantyhose stuffed with whole cone hops. This works as a jerryrigged hop back and will filter out most of the kettle gunk.
If you ferment in buckets, look into bucket filters (like this https://www.dudadiesel.com/choose_item.php?id=fs5 ). You can pour through it to catch more of the gunk and end up with more wort in the fermenter.
I do late hop additions with pellets all the time and can’t whirlpool since my kettle has a false bottom and I draw from the center when cooling through myt plate chiller.
Another idea is to invest in a fine mesh bag like the BIAB ones. That will keep most of the hop residue in the bag and not in your kettle. Remove the bag and let it drain into the kettle before you chill the beer. It works great for me.
Another idea- use whole hops for those late additions.
Yes, we have ideas! Use only whole leaf hops. That’s what we use, and never have any issues with the murky / muddy / sludge that you are experiencing.
I am biased towards whole leaf hops and there is a reason.
Performance is first. They also act like a natural filter bed in the bottom of your boil kettle.
And whole hops are readily available certain times of the year. When they come in, we stock up!
OTOH, I use only pellets and don’t have that problem, either. My kettles don’t require a filter bed. I used to be a whole hip snob, brewing in the hop growing territory of the PNW. The the best brewer I know convinced me to try pellets and I’ve never gone back to whole. They stay fresher longer and take up less room to store.
And I’m not trying to change your mind…just point out another point of view.
Just like when you need a doctor, always good to get another opinion.
I haven’t used whole hops in so many years I can’t remember when. I far prefer pellet hops over whole hops for all the reason’s Denny mentioned. They definitely stay fresher longer and store better and they are far easier to use and have less wort absorption. They do work well for filtering out trub, but only if your kettle is designed not to clog with them.
Aside from Sierra Nevada I’m not really sure how many commercial craft breweries are using pellets either. If you have a favorite commercially made IPA chances are it was made with pellets.
And there is my problem, as I don’t do IPA’s, commercial or otherwise.
But here is a related question…is there any reason hops cannot be added after flame out, say around 100 degrees F? I don’t dry hop, but am interested in very late hop additions. Again, we are talking whole leaf.
Whole leaf hops store very well, in nitrogen sealed bags. When I open up a bag, the left over hops are then vacuum sealed in another bag. They last a long time.
It’s been so long since we used pellets, can’t remember when it was! Is my bias showing? ;D
Check out “hop stands” - lot’s of us have experimented with different temperature WP. I have tried 160F for a couple hours. Once I did an overnight hop stand as well at several different temps using a PicoBrew (I don’t recall the numbers exactly) I’ve never tried one at 100F but I’m sure someone has.
I don’t mean to imply that you shouldn’t use whole hops especially if your system is designed to work with them. But I think it would be a mistake to say or think that whole hops are superior to hop pellets in most cases.
For several years In was realkky really into hop stands and whirlpool hopping. But I eventually decided that they were poor subs for what I get from dry hops.
Here is a late addition, with 10 minutes left in the boil.
Note the nice filter bed they formed, and all of the gunk that gets filtered out of the chilled wort. There is a false bottom, and it catches what gets past the hops.
But I’m sure those who use pellets get the same results, maybe even better.
I actually have 2 kettles, one designed for whole hops and one designed for pellets. If I swap the style of hops in either one it would clog or cause problems during the knockout. So kettle design would be the very first consideration on what hops to use.
My preference is to use whole hops with a false bottom. It is an order of magnitude easier to use than dealing with pellet sludge. That being said, whole hops and really hoppy beer translates to significant wort loss. Luckily, my preference is for non-really hoppy beer. What made me switch to pellets was Mark Garetz getting out the business. I prefer to purchase hops as close to grower as possible and Hops Direct only sold whole hops by the pound, which is too much of one variety for my use (Mark used to sell whole hops by the half pound). Plus, shipping is cheaper for pellets. I know that people are going to think that I am crazy, but the bitterness from whole hops comes across as rounder/smoother than it does with pellets. Plus, something is lost oil-wise during pelletization. Not only can I tell, but my friends asked me what changed when I switched over to using pellets. If using a counterflow chiller was not such a pain in the backside compared to using an immersion chiller, I would go with the process used by the Peter Austin and Partners system breweries; namely, pellets in the kettle followed whole cones in a hop percolator (hopback).
Yes, you’re crazy 
+1
One pound of whole leaf too much? Vacuum seal the leftovers, and store them in the freezer. They will last many months.
I brew 5-gallon or smaller batches, so yes, a pound of whole cones of any given cultivar will last me at least two years because I use multiple cultivars. Two years is too long for whole cones for my liking. I usually use half of an ounce to an ounce of bittering hops and one to two ounces of aroma hops per batch (i.e., I have a preference for balanced to slightly hop-forward beer). I usually use between two and four cultivars per batch. On a good year, I will brew twelve 5-gallon batches, which means that I use less two pounds of hops total per year. I used to keep Cascade, Galena, Liberty, Tettnanger, and Willamette on hand when I used whole cones. I could do that when I could purchase oil-rated whole cones by the half pound from Mark Garetz. I still wound up giving away some hops, but not like I would have to do purchasing whole cones by the pound.
Find a brewing buddy, and split an order. 1/2 lb each. That’s the ticket.