I finally assembled everything I need and am really excited to give this a go! Everything on the forum has been great and I hope some day I will be able to contribute instead of asking these newbie questions…
The two kits I bought from Northern are specialty grain extract kits with hop pellets. My question is, do the pellets completely dissolve in the boil or should I expect to need to drain out residual pieces?
They are ground up hops compressed into pellets. They disintegrate but not dissolve. You will have to strain if you don’t put them in a bag.
They do not dissolve, but they do disperse into very fine particles. You will be left with some green muck left over. If some gets into your fermenter it’s generally not too big of a deal, but most brewers try to keep it out of the fermenter.
The Pellets will loosen up and become a lot like loose leaf tea. a big mass of vegetative matter. when you tranfer to primary if some gets in dont worry about it, it will settle to the bottom in short order, and if it bothers you that much, you can transfer to a different vessel to get your beer off of said trub.
RDWDAH(when its ready;)
I use a nylon hop bag for pellets. Without it, you have a lot of straining to do.
+1 to nylon hop bags. They almost completely eliminate hop sludge, even in IPAs.
Glad I thought to ask. I will pick up a nylon hop back from my local brew store.
5 gallon paint straining bags from the hardware store work great too.
Paul
I also like to use these for mashing grains. Sort of a mini-BIAB for partial mashes.
You can easily get 5 lbs of grain into these bags.
Get a bunch of hop socks, you’ll use them. Or go nylon and re-use them. Point being get more than one, you’ll use them in short order.
+1. My other go-to for hops. Great for dryhopping larger amounts.
I like the paint strainer, and I’ve also used muslin bags with success. Now I just throw them in the boil but I have the Blichmann HopBlocker. My experience has shown that regardless of which of these methods you employ, you will get some percentage of fine hop particles that make it through to the fermenter. A whirlpool in conjunction with a hop filter works somewhat better in removing hops and trub.
A lot of folks don’t move wort from a primary fermenter to a secondary. But if you do, my impression is that it doesn’t much matter how much trub (hops, etc.) get into your primary.
Its homebrew, the only thing that matters is that you enjoy it:)
I use this (probably not enough time to worry about making one before you brew):
The bag is the paint strainer bags from Home Depot.
ive read about those DIY hop spiders before. they seem to be very basic to build. all you need is a PVC collar, 3 lag bolts, some nuts to go on it, and a hose clamp. definatly worth doing if you can pull it off.
By the way, photos ! We want to see the first batch in process
Yes let’s see some pics:)
okay, okay, I will try to take some photos although all the reading I have done, I don’t remember which step that is 
Sunday, I still need to go grab a couple last minute things today and my son has is Spring Formal this afternoon so brewing will be sometime after church tomorrow…