Inge
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 9/6/07
- Messages
- 183
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Hi ladies and gents,
The story so far...
I've been 2 years out of the brewing game and have just gotten back into it - I cut my teeth a month ago on a fairly forgiving style, an extract APA, and all smell and taste indicators are pointing towards a good result.
Naturally, I almost immediately got the itch to bang out an all grain hefeweizen, so I spend a bit of money and time replacing some of my old ghetto gear which was still kicking around in the garage. I'm running a bazooka in the mash tun instead of a braid, and a false bottom in the kettle in lieu of the equally functional and ugly pickup tube + tea ball monstrosity I made about 4 years ago. All fittings have been converted to stainless, and I'm although I do have an immersion chiller, I prefer to no-chill. Brew day was yesterday and everything went beautifully, the fly sparge ran well at an efficiency of just over 70 percent. The boil was rollicking, the hops were added and everything was falling into place - I hadn't even burnt myself yet.
I felt invincible.
After flameout and whirlpool, it came time to transfer the hot wort into the cube; I turned the valve and... nothing. Not a drop. The boil had been too damn vigorous and had lifted the false bottom off the base of the kettle, allowing hop plugs to creep under and do what hops do best - jam themselves into places they shouldn't (interestingly, this wouldn't have happened with pellets!). After scratching my head for 10 minutes, I popped the lid on and left to go see a film, doing everything I could not to lose my shit in the process.
When I came back it had cooled enough to allow me to reach in and disconnect the false bottom. I fitted out my HLT with the bazooka screen from the mash tun and transferred the wort from the kettle to the HLT. Then, I put the HLT back on the burner to pasteurise the wort (had been sitting there for a few hours and had my arm in it). Once it hit 90 I held it there for a 5 minutes and racked immediately to the cube. The bazooka was a dream, filtering out bucket loads of hop debris and trub and leaving very little wort in the HLT.
I went to bed, chalking the day up to a win.
Discussion
Righto, I've obviously done something wrong. The false bottom isn't secured down to the floor of the kettle, it runs to the barb to the tap via 3/8 ID thick silicon tubing. I prefer my boils to be relatively vigorous - I think that this is causing the FB to flap about at the bottom. Now, I had a few ideas to remedy this.
a) Permanently swap out the bazooka from the tun to kettle and the FB from kettle to tun.
b) Stainless or otherwise inert weights to hold the FB down.
c) Hard plumb the false bottom with copper and allow the tension of the metal to push the FB flush.
I'm leaning towards A. What do you guys do currently? What would you recommend?
The story so far...
I've been 2 years out of the brewing game and have just gotten back into it - I cut my teeth a month ago on a fairly forgiving style, an extract APA, and all smell and taste indicators are pointing towards a good result.
Naturally, I almost immediately got the itch to bang out an all grain hefeweizen, so I spend a bit of money and time replacing some of my old ghetto gear which was still kicking around in the garage. I'm running a bazooka in the mash tun instead of a braid, and a false bottom in the kettle in lieu of the equally functional and ugly pickup tube + tea ball monstrosity I made about 4 years ago. All fittings have been converted to stainless, and I'm although I do have an immersion chiller, I prefer to no-chill. Brew day was yesterday and everything went beautifully, the fly sparge ran well at an efficiency of just over 70 percent. The boil was rollicking, the hops were added and everything was falling into place - I hadn't even burnt myself yet.
I felt invincible.
After flameout and whirlpool, it came time to transfer the hot wort into the cube; I turned the valve and... nothing. Not a drop. The boil had been too damn vigorous and had lifted the false bottom off the base of the kettle, allowing hop plugs to creep under and do what hops do best - jam themselves into places they shouldn't (interestingly, this wouldn't have happened with pellets!). After scratching my head for 10 minutes, I popped the lid on and left to go see a film, doing everything I could not to lose my shit in the process.
When I came back it had cooled enough to allow me to reach in and disconnect the false bottom. I fitted out my HLT with the bazooka screen from the mash tun and transferred the wort from the kettle to the HLT. Then, I put the HLT back on the burner to pasteurise the wort (had been sitting there for a few hours and had my arm in it). Once it hit 90 I held it there for a 5 minutes and racked immediately to the cube. The bazooka was a dream, filtering out bucket loads of hop debris and trub and leaving very little wort in the HLT.
I went to bed, chalking the day up to a win.
Discussion
Righto, I've obviously done something wrong. The false bottom isn't secured down to the floor of the kettle, it runs to the barb to the tap via 3/8 ID thick silicon tubing. I prefer my boils to be relatively vigorous - I think that this is causing the FB to flap about at the bottom. Now, I had a few ideas to remedy this.
a) Permanently swap out the bazooka from the tun to kettle and the FB from kettle to tun.
b) Stainless or otherwise inert weights to hold the FB down.
c) Hard plumb the false bottom with copper and allow the tension of the metal to push the FB flush.
I'm leaning towards A. What do you guys do currently? What would you recommend?