Trub and does it really matter?

[Pagey]

G'day guys.

I did a search on this but didn't find much.

So I didn't think much about my setup before purchase. Got myself a 25L pot. I need to punch 22L out of it so that I get 19L out of my fermenter. This means that up until now I have been putting ALL of my trub into the fermenter....

So that you understand my perspective here is my process.

25L kettle warms 10-15L of water and I make water chem adjustments if I feel the need.
That goes into a RubberMaid 38L Cooler until strike temp then I dough in.
Nothing fancy, depending on the grist and the grist to water ratio I leave undisturbed for 1-1.5hrs. With ambient temps in Darwin I may hit initial mash temp of 68 and it may have only dropped one or two degrees after the full hour and a half.
I try my best to lauder as well as possible and I think I do a pretty good job. It's not crystal clear but it is free of particles large enough to notice.
I then batch sparge with another 15L and I end up with 20-22L of 1.050 off a 5kg grist. (Being in Darwin having to buy down south that's how it is cause AusPost have a 5kg satchel. Any heavier and things get a bit out of control)
I usually boil for between 1-1.5hrs depending on recipe. I get a good rolling boil going on.
At 10 mins I add half a tab of coppertun whirfloc and a copper cooling coil.
At 0 mins the pot gets dunked in an ice bath and ice water gets pumped through the coil until I'm down to about 8c.

So I get a good hot break and a good cold break. The wort that I collect for OG reading as I tap off into the fermenter is crystal clear, problem is my tap is at the bottom of the kettle and sucks in all the trub. So onto the question.



I'm not particularly worried about this with my Ales, they taste great as is, but my Lagers are lacking something and I think this might have something to do with their fermentation, which is something I control quite well I believe.


I hear some conflicting views on this topic so let me pose a very specific question about this.
Has anyone purposefully made drastic reductions in the amount of trub going into the fermenter and has it made a noticeable enough difference to warrant advising others to change their ways?
If so what were the changes they noticed to the end product?

Thanks

 

[waggastew]

If you have the time you might want to wade through this thread:

http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/71545-fermenting-on-hot-break/

 

[thylacine]

G'day guys.

I did a search on this but didn't find much.

So I didn't think much about my setup before purchase. Got myself a 25L pot. I need to punch 22L out of it so that I get 19L out of my fermenter. This means that up until now I have been putting ALL of my trub into the fermenter....

So that you understand my perspective here is my process.

25L kettle warms 10-15L of water and I make water chem adjustments if I feel the need.
That goes into a RubberMaid 38L Cooler until strike temp then I dough in.
Nothing fancy, depending on the grist and the grist to water ratio I leave undisturbed for 1-1.5hrs. With ambient temps in Darwin I may hit initial mash temp of 68 and it may have only dropped one or two degrees after the full hour and a half.
I try my best to lauder as well as possible and I think I do a pretty good job. It's not crystal clear but it is free of particles large enough to notice.
I then batch sparge with another 15L and I end up with 20-22L of 1.050 off a 5kg grist. (Being in Darwin having to buy down south that's how it is cause AusPost have a 5kg satchel. Any heavier and things get a bit out of control)
I usually boil for between 1-1.5hrs depending on recipe. I get a good rolling boil going on.
At 10 mins I add half a tab of coppertun whirfloc and a copper cooling coil.
At 0 mins the pot gets dunked in an ice bath and ice water gets pumped through the coil until I'm down to about 8c.

So I get a good hot break and a good cold break. The wort that I collect for OG reading as I tap off into the fermenter is crystal clear, problem is my tap is at the bottom of the kettle and sucks in all the trub. So onto the question.



I'm not particularly worried about this with my Ales, they taste great as is, but my Lagers are lacking something and I think this might have something to do with their fermentation, which is something I control quite well I believe.


I hear some conflicting views on this topic so let me pose a very specific question about this.
Has anyone purposefully made drastic reductions in the amount of trub going into the fermenter and has it made a noticeable enough difference to warrant advising others to change their ways?
If so what were the changes they noticed to the end product?

Thanks

Re: '...I did a search on this but didn't find much..."


Google ahb "trub"

 

[emnpaul]

So I get a good hot break and a good cold break. The wort that I collect for OG reading as I tap off into the fermenter is crystal clear, problem is my tap is at the bottom of the kettle and sucks in all the trub. So onto the question.

If you were able to fit a length of clear plastic hose to the tap and open the tap slowly, so as to not over shoot and waste wort, you could drain off the trub/break material and run the clear wort into the fermentor. Then you'd be in position to judge the difference it makes personally.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

No. The trub won't basically hurt. It will just settle in the ferm. Don't get hung up about.it..

 

[bradsbrew]

Throwing on a pick up tube and trying to get some sort of whirlpool action happening won't hurt either. Better off adding a litre of boiled water at end of boil than using trub as part of your volume calc.

Cheers

 

[manticle]

If you're going to the effort of whirlpooling and using kettle finings, you might as well add a pickup to your tap.

Can't answer your specific question as I've never really done a side by side comparison and I make an effort to keep the majority of hot break out. Cold break doesn't bother me. I have fermented on hot break in the early days of AG but these were stouts and American browns and were drunk very quickly. I see no reason to start adding the gunk to my beers though and my whirlpool is effective enough to leave most of it behind (no pickup).

 

[jaypes]

I have fermented on trub/hot break a number of times - made some pretty good beers as well and have no noticeable difference in my opinion.

I only did it to get the volume out of a couple of my first runs out of a new rig

 

[Pagey]

Thanks for the feedback all.

So to clarify I defn do skim the hot break off the top while boiling as much as I possibly can. It is the cold break that settles in the bottom of the kettle after chilling that I am concerned about. Based on the responses and other info I can find it doesn't seem to be the opinion of the masses that this trub at the bottom of the kettle has a dramatic impact on fermentation and in turn the final result.

Thanks heaps. Next time I build a system I will consider this aspect but until then I'll focus on pitching rate, viability and temps to see if I can get that super crisp result I am chasing.

 

[Dan Pratt]

My suggestion - if the ales are turning out good but you are noticing that the lagers are not quite to taste I would suggest racking to secondary. Lagers dont have much to hide behind like ales in the way of more malts or higher IBU........ Leaving the primary to ferment for 4-5days and then rack to secondary for the remainder of the fermentation, this will remove the beer from the Trub/hops/coldbreak and you may notice a different cleaner beer.

This worked for me so its just a suggestion, not gospel. h34r:

 

[manticle]

Skimming during boil won't remove all the hot break.

 

[bum]

It doesn't even make any appreciable difference to the amount of break material at the end of boil in my experience.

 

[Edak]

at the point of draining the kettle, how do you differentiate the hot and cold break?

 

[jc64]

Pagey - The basic brewing podcast did a episode of comparing wort with the break material and without. Check that out and it should answer your query.

http://www.basicbrewing.com/index.php?page=basic-brewing-brew-your-own-experiments

 

[Bribie G]

at the point of draining the kettle, how do you differentiate the hot and cold break?

When draining the kettle there isn't any cold break. That forms later during chilling or in the no chill cube.

I prefer the clearest wort practicable into the cube and that's easy. Run the first couple of litres off into clean jars (I use litre Schott bottles) and cap immediately. They will be micro-no-chill-cubes so just put them to one side.

This is the first bottle out, see the hot break.



Sometimes you can really luck out - these bottle are photographed hot, I'd love to get this every time.



Then the wort should be running bright, although you do risk getting a bit of trub carry over right towards the end. I use a couple of 10L NC cubes from Bunnings so I can get a full cube and two litre Schotts every time.

next day your collection bottle should look typically like this:



You can just see a wee boundary at the 100 ml mark there, where that fluffy hot break settled overnight. The jellyfish stuff above is the cold break that formed overnight and is fine to go into the brew. There will be quite a bit of it in the cube of course.

If you have collected two bottles, one will have much more hot break in than the other. These photos are old but I'd guess I took that photo of bottle #2 as it's a good example of cold break.

So pour the good parts of the bottles into the fermenter or even brew a litre bigger in the recipe and you've got a good starter wort.

 

[nala]

I am attaching a Bremate - Brewday worksheet as an example of the water requirements for a batch size of 20 litres, this is in the ball park of what you are trying to achieve.
It appears that your kettle volume is too small for the batch size that you require.
I get 20 litres into my fermenter which requires a boil size of 30 litres.
Have a look at the boil-off percentage....10.4%, I boil for 90 minutes I am left with 25.3 litres which includes 4.5litres of deadspace and loss to trub a further 4% to cooling leaving 20 litres into fermenter.