Filtering Out The Hops

[tdack]

The tap is a little bit harder but not impossible.

I immerse my tap in boiling water for 2 to 3 minutes then with a large pair of multi grips I grab the handle and pull it apart.
I always find gunk in the tap.

I've found that a wooden spoon or similar sized implement placed into the body from the inlet side and then tapped sharply on the bench is enough to dislodge my taps after a soak. Just make sure that you don't use anything that will scratch the plastic inside the tap.

I rack all my beers but I dont syphon them

I have a length of silicon tubing a bit over a meter long. After boiling it for a few minutes I push it onto the tap of the fermenter with the beer in it and place the other end in my sterlized fermenter on the ground. Then I turn the tap on and it drains into the clean fermenter.
Before anyone jumps up an down....NO I dont get gunk and yuck from the bottom of the fermenter.
I stop the flow when I see the gunk start to flow down the tube.
This leaves all the gunk and trub in the old fermenter and my precious brew ready for cold largering in the fridge for a few weeks.

I have done it this way for a few years and not had a problem.

Cheers

JWB

Same here, although I ended up with a bit of hose the same size as the tap and a slightly larger piece that fits over both the tap and the hose, makes connecting it very easy. My bottling cane fits in the other end, so I just line all the bottles up and move the cane rather than lifting each bottle to the fermenter.

 

[RobboMC]

When I first started dry hopping I thought I had a major disaster, a complely blocked tap. No amount of coaxing would get even the slightest amount of liquid through. With hindsight I should have set about siphoning, but instead I set up a bucket to catch the brew and just removed the tap altogether! Splish-splash and major gush of beer all over the place including mostly into the bucket. As warmbeer has learned, I relaxed, had a beer and all was Ok. I bottled it, let it sit for a few months and it was a good brew. Blocked taps are not an impossible problem.