Last weekend my brew bud Travis and I cooked up a batch of Kilkenny Irish Ale Clone.
All went well. We had a nice even rolling boil.
We use a 5 gallon paint strainer as a hops bag. We had clipped it differently than usual, around one half (almost) of the boil kettle and added hops as called for. Part of the elastic band at the top of the bag was stretched across the middle of the pot.
Here's the strange part....as the boil reached the top of the kettle, it overflowed into the paint strainer bag almost like a waterfall, as the wort in the bag was not bubbling/foaming up.
We were happy that this was keeping the pot from boiling over, but it wasn't until we drained the wort that we saw something amazing.
There was almost no trub or hot break in the bottom of the pot! Why? I appears that is was all filtered by the hops bag as the boil push it all up and over the side and into the paint strainer/hops bag.
Is this a good thing? I'm really not sure, as many feel that some trub/hot break/cold break serves as nutrients for the yeast. I guess we'll see how the batch turns out and report back!
Cheers!
Update: Here's a video showing the technique in action:
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3 comments:
I've been looking for a simple solution to dealing with the hot break for almost a year now. I'm glad I found this video, thanks for the tip.
That is quite amazing...I use a hop spider and keggle though so won't work for me :(
I also use a hop spider and a keggle. During cooling I recirculate through a plate chiller and then back through the top of the bag and am able to catch both hot and cold break. Works very well. The bag fills up and can overflow so I scrape the sides with my mashing paddle during the recirc. It catches a ton of stuff this way.
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