I got a new hopscreen, a hopback and also a plate chiller (I know.....but I ordered it before the last thread on the difficulty of cleaning these).
Aaanyway, I thought I'd do another batch of the Galaxian Pale Ale I did before as it was so good - even though I lost almost the whole kegful due to a leaking beer out post.
The recipe for 23l was:
Grain
5.5kg Maris Otter
250g Medium Crystal
150g Wheat Malt
Hops
15g Galaxy Pellets First Wort
25g Galaxy Pellets 15 mins
25g Cascade Whole Hops in the hop back
I figured that hop pellets in the hop back wouldn't work, so went for the Cascade instead.
Yeast
US-05
Water treated to Dry Pale Ale setting on Graham's water calculator.
This should give me 23l at 1052 and 44 IBU
First off, here's the shinies:
This is the hopscreen, it's rather nice....all stainless including all the fittings. It screws into the 1/2" female thread on my kettle. There is a downward facing pickup tube inside the screen that gets to about 3mm off the floor of the kettle.
Here's the plate chiller and hopback. All the stuff is really well made, very good quality welds, thick stainless steel and top notch fittings. All good so far. The discolouration is due to me baking them in the oven at 230C for an hour to make sure they were clean and sterile. I might give them a soak in citric acid and a go over with barkeeper's friend tomorrow.
The hopback is packed with 25g of Cascade flowers
Here's the grist
Mashed in
I hit my target mash temp (66C) pretty much smack on. It got down to 64.4 by the end of the 90 minute mash
Here's the first lot of hop pellets. These things are so small it almost doesn't look worth it.....but they smell SO GOOD!
And the first runnings going in
This is the mash pH after about 75 minutes. I forgot to take it at the beginning of the mash
Here's my cunningly bodged setup.....I just want to get everything working before I make it pretty! I've had the March May pump for a while, but this is it's first outing. The free barb on the plate chiller is the beer out to the FV. The ball valve is to control the flow through the chiller.
All went well with the mash and the boil so i went to run off, turned on the water to the chiller, opened the ball valve on the kettle, nice flow to the hopback, turned on the pump and.......nothing.
Balls.
After a while, i started getting a dribble through the hopback into the pump, so I went off and left it. Came back 10 mins later to find that the base of the FV wasn't even covered yet. So much for that approach.
The problem was, the hopback was blocking the flow to the pump. Of course, I think I did a stupid thing by shooting pellet trub into a hopback completely full of hops - it just filled up all the crevices and jammed the flow almost instantly.
In the end, I took the hopback out of the loop and....whoosh......about a minute later, I've got 23 litres of wort in the FV. Of course, i still had the ball valve controlling the chiller flow fully open, so it all just shot through there. Mind you - it still dropped the wort to about 38C in about one minute. Pretty damn good (30 plate chiller)....but it would have been perfect if I had remembered to close it then just cracked it a little to control the flow.
Once the hopback had cooled down, I opened it up to find that I had obviously packed too many hops in there, they had got wet and expanded and compressed themselves. You can even see the marks from the screen at the end of the hopback on this plug of hops. No wonder the wort couldn't get through. At the other end, the hops were completely covered in pellet trub.
So - moral of the story......less hops in the hopback, and probably don't use it at all if there are only pellet hops in the kettle. The fine pellet trub just clogs things up.
On a positive note, the small amount of wort that did get though the hopback smelled incredible. Much more intense than using a last minute addition.
But - as I took the hopback out of the circuit, I'm not going to have much of this lovely aroma, so I think I will have to dry hop this one.
Is it possible to dry hop with pellets? If I chuck some into the FV once the primary fermentation is done, do you think that would work? Leave it a week and then carefully rack to the keg and fine in the keg?
I hope the hopback isn't a complete washout! I'll try it again with just flower hops in the kettle and about half the amount of hops in it. C'est la vie....
Another positive was that the hop screen coped just fine with the pellets. The pump sucked everything out of the kettle in no time......I didn't realise that they actually sucked as well as pumped and it didn't half go fast! It's a 1/5th HP motor on it and I'm impressed. It's also far quieter than I thought it would be.
Well, I think my FV full of wort should be down to around 25C or so now, so I'd better go and pitch the yeast in a bit.
Thankfully, the beer should be fine! It's got a lot of cold break and a fair bit of pellet trub in it, but that will all settle out in the FV.
) between boiler/pump, will help when the boiler level gets low.
In my brewday today I FWD hopped (for the first time) with 16g of Chinook pellets. At 11.1% AA that was all that was needed, but it just looks so odd with such a tiny amount in the boiler!
Got me so hot I had to go and browse Beerbelly myself.
) In your photo it looks as though your hops had been pressing against a mesh disk, whereas the photo on the website shows a cylinder. I'm asking because I'm planning a cheap knock-off using a water bottle.