Gear Review - In-boil stainless-mesh hop filters

[mr_wibble]

First a disclaimer: This gear report is not sponsored by anyone, all the gear I paid for myself. No opinions have been bought nor sold.

So I've been playing around lately with containing my hops in the boil, so I can easily remove a bit of trub at the end of the boil.

Traditionally you can just use a hop-sock for this. The impetus for trying out different methods came after I made an apple & smoked malt beer (recipe from BYO magazine about 6 months ago). The 3kg of chopped apples produced a f(n) huge amount of trub, and it got me to thinking about methods of removing the trub at end-of-boil. Of course I whirlpool etc. But for my process, more trub == less wort. That, and I like mucking around with gear.

First I tried dry-hop balls - these are for in-pot tea straining spheres, about 6cm across. Available in most LHBSs for dry-hopping kegs. These work OK but only if there's a tiny amount of hops. Once they're about 1/2 full, the hops in the boil (or the keg) will puff-up to fill the ball, forming a cake.

Next I found these mega-tea-strainers: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/High-Quality-1pcs-11cm-Reusable-Stainless-Mesh-Herbal-Ball-Tea-Spice-Strainer-Teakettle-Easy-To-Drink/32323539777.html

These are about 12cm in diameter (wont fit in a post-mix keg). In a ~20 litre batch, using 2x of them (half the hops in each) works OK. But probably only up to 25 grams of hop pellets. Once again, too many hop pellets, and you get a nicely rounded hop-cake that doesn't boil properly..

So then I found this thing: It's a bit pricey, but it was Friday night, and the couple of beers had dulled my financial piety.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Homebrew-Hop-Filter-Stainless-Steel-Strainer-Pot-300-mesh-top-quality-wonderful-design-for-homebrewers/32699072032.html


First off: it's big. About 350mm across, and 300mm deep (not including the feets). I assume it's made for some kind of smaller BIAB system.


I have a 185 litre kettle (SS pot from Keg King). So it's small compared to my kettle. In a single and possibly double batch it would just sit on the bottom. However the maiden-run yesterday was a triple-batch. I used a string to tie it in position above the water-line.



The rightmost photo there shows it just sitting in the wort, with ~115 grams of hop pellets just added.
During the boil everything looked OK. There was certainly plenty of wort in and around the hop pellets.



At the end of boil, it drained much more slowly than I expected. Basically I thought I could just lift the sucker straight out. But it slowly drained. I was a bit wary of the thing folding up like a pretzel if I yanked it out with all that weight in it, so I had to take it slow. It probably took about 10 minutes to drain bit by bit, but I had to stand there lifting the thing, so it seemed like ages.



It's a bit amazing just how much hop material comes from a meagre 115 grams of hop pellets. It may not look much in the last photo, but I reckon that's about a litre of hop material. Afterwards I was able to pretty much just hose the filter off. Lots of hop-bits were caught in nooks and crannies, so I felt like I had to hose it 3x times. Then I gave it a light sponge with some detergent, before finally rinsing.

So was it worth it? I guess that depends on how the beer turns out. Everything effects the final product, maybe I will get a little less hop utilisation, but I'm guessing I wont be able to notice. There was a bit of "hop powder" along with the hot-break in the trub, but with a 300 micron mesh, there's relatively no hop material at all (but not "none"). The lack of hop material in the pot allowed me to get a few extra litres of wort out before it would typically start getting sucked up into the tap. So that's a win for the primary use case. On the downside, it added a bit of time and mucking around, and yet-another piece of gear to clean and store.

All-up I guess I'm happy with the performance.

Now if I had one that was 98% the size of my brew-pot I could lift the hot-break material out with the hops too! I wonder if they do custom-orders

cheers,
-kt

 

[n87]

Cool.
It looks like its about the same size mesh that the kk hop spider uses... and that's the main thing I hate about it.

Sure, it keeps all the hop crap in, but at the same time I wonder how much hop goodness is let out?
Sure that one is much bigger than the spider, so you have much more wort in the bucket, but I still wonder.

Then there is the draining... I have found that it's something from the boiling wort, not the hops that blocks it, as it drains fine until it's been in there for 5 mins, and if you scrape the outside off, you get a fast draining spot.

Then there is cleaning... I have to hit it with a nail brush to get all the crap out of the mesh.
My blast brew, I just used a hop sock.

On my list of new equipment is a hop spider (or bucket now) that has a less fine mesh.

 

[mr_wibble]

I guess it's a trade-off between trub and slower filtering. I wonder what size the mesh is in a tea-strainer.

 

[n87]

Considerably bigger... like 100 times (says my memory, having neither in front of me) the tea strainer you can almost measure with a ruler.

Something in the middle I think would be best.

 

[fdsaasdf]

I have been using the OP's large tea strainers for dry hopping for a year or so, haven't had any issues cleaning yet and no sign of rust like the tea balls I used previously.

Like others have said, over time the keg king spider is far too fine to allow hop matter to circulate. It does turn out to be very handy for catching sediment during recirculation, but it's also a real pain to keep clean (after ~20 batches).

In my up-to-triple batch 1V build I'm yet to work out how best to minimise hop trub. I've a 1x1m sheet of muslin material so I'll probably end up dropping a few stainless nuts in that and making a hop swimming pool for the first few batches.