I’m doing a closed transfer this morning and it’s super slow. Like a gallon in the last hour. I think the dry hop bag must have landed smack dab over the bucket spigot or something. I’m going to see if the hardware store has some stainless wire or something I can bend up to fish around the spigot. Any ideas?
I’ve had this happen also due to a hop bag. I fished mine out with a bent coat hanger (sanitized). It dramatically improved flow.
Can you reach into the bucket with a sanitized spoon and remove the hop bag or at least push it out of the way? As long as you don’t splash the beer you shouldn’t introduce any O2 into the beer
I’ll bet it did!
I was able to find the bag by sticking the (sanitized) stainless wire through the airlock hole (6oz of hops in this batch so trying to be super careful with oxidation). The bag was still floating on top. I moved it away from the spigot but no luck. I ended up putting about 2psi of CO2 into the airlock and still nothing until I disconnected the “beer-in” line on the keg. Reconnected and it took off. Some trub must have gotten jammed up in poppet I guess? It’s going a little better now but still needs kind of pokey. I’m not sure what happened but going to see if I can get this transferred and determine later.
I have had a poppet plug at the start of a transfer. It doesn’t take much, but once cleared (by removing and reconnecting) it was fine. It is hard to tell how fast the beer is flowing, so I used to put a piece of tape on the fermenter to mark the level so I could judge the change. Now I put the keg on a scale and watch how fast the weight is increasing.
I’ve used the scale method too, but more or less to tell when the keg is full. It’s never been a perfect science and my batches vary (trub) depending how/how much I hop so I kinda gave up on it. It is nice to use for seeing how the transfer process is going. I didn’t know my transfer was stuck until I came back 30 minutes later. The scale would have paid off there.
I did find some suspicious material in the disconnect when cleaning. This was after running oxiclean and purging the transfer hose, so not sure how much gunk was in there originally. Most likely where the problem was.
4ccadYQ (7.4 KB)
(I can never get pictures to post in the forum, so here’s a URL plugged disconnect - Album on Imgur). I’ve been experiementing with just tossing hops in the boil but might go back to using the spider with larger hop loads.