Filter advice

[Colliedog]

Hi. Effectively been lurking on here for a while. I have recently started all grain brewing and am planning to do my fourth batch tomorrow.

The boiler I have has a hop filter which is effectively a piece of copper pipe which is pushed into the back of a plastic tea urn tap. In the last three boils this filter has fallen off twice during the boil. As a result of this last time I had boiled my hood in muslin bags. As far as j can tell this had no effect on the finished beer despite a fair amount of true from the boiler ending up in the fermenter. As a unintended bonus my boiler dead space was significantly less than before.

My short question is until I replace my filter should I persevere with it or discard it if using muslin bags for the hops.

Help would be greatly appreciated as I keep chopping and changing my mind.

[alexlark]

If it's any help I don't even use a filter in my boiler. I let the wort settle for 30 mins then syphon with a length of pipe using a sieve over the FV with an off cut of voile in the sieve too. Works a treat. Once the syphon stops I tip the rest of the trub in the sieve too. It really reduces the dead space and the voile holds back virtually all of the trub. It all settles out in the FV durung fermentation anyway. Keeping it simple

[Colliedog]

Thanks. Actually now you mention your voile filter I do have a new sink sieve I could sanitise and use to catch anything coming out the tap then tip to minimise dead space.

[Fil]

another take on bagging hops is a hop spider (a frame to suspend an open bag in the boil) this lets you make the staged hop additions easily..

Many swear by free hops in the boil, i cant say ive noticed any loss of hop impact since moving to a spider, but i also recirculate via a pump out of the kettle drain back up into the hop bag during the boil too..

When making this move i raised the concern about extra trub passing into the FV and more experienced brewers suggested it was nothing to worry about and that the trub will contain nutrients useful for yeast populations growth..

[Colliedog]

I will build a hop spider for next time. Using hop bags and no filter today. We'll see how it turn out.

[Matt in Birdham]

When making this move i raised the concern about extra trub passing into the FV and more experienced brewers suggested it was nothing to worry about and that the trub will contain nutrients useful for yeast populations growth..

The consensus is pretty strong on this one - letting trub into the FV really makes no negative difference at all. Unless you are using a plate chiller or whole hops then I really don't think there is any need to worry. Despite my best efforts at whirlpooling, I always end up with an inch or so of trub on the bottom of my FV, which compacts further as it settles - no problems at all.