Has anyone with a Boilermaker or other brew kettle with a dip tube messed with the angle and found it useful? I was wondering if i put it at a 45* angle to prevent putting all the trub and hops into the fermentor, would this leave too much wort behind?
My SOP now is to drain into a sanitized bucket and then pour through a strainer into the fermentor. While this isn’t too tedious a process it’s one less step and one less thing to sanitize if I could skip this and drain right into the fermenter. I don’t mind a little trub going in, but I don’t want half a gallon of it.
I haven’t tried to change the angle of the dip tube yet, but I use a hop spider to keep the hops out of the bottom of the kettle, remove it when I am done chilling, then let the trub settle for 20min. or so. I drain directly into the fermentor and watch as I get close to the bottom. I partially close off the valve to reduce the flow rate and then stop when the wort/trub reaches the rim for the false bottom. This leaves most of the trub behind, may lose a quart or less of the wort.
I use a hop spider but my next recipe I will be doing a 15 minute whirlpool and adding them to the hop spider would make things difficult to stir. The recipe is 90min bittering charge and 2oz whirlpool. I plan on putting the bittering hops in the hop spider and pulling that out and adding the 2oz of hops after flameout. while 2oz shouldn’t be whole heck of a lot, id still rather keep as much behind as possible.
I have the same dilemma on whirlpool hopping and not wanting trub. I just build a dip tube for my keggle that forms a circle on the bottom of the keg. I’m hoping the whirlpool puts the hops in the center and my dip tube will grab the hops from the outer ring.
I’m assuming you have an internal chiller and would get all the cold break and everything in the pot which adds to what you are trying to filter out. I have a 10 gallon boilermaker and use a CFC myself so all my cold break goes into the carboy. I just brewed the Plinian Legacy with a 4 oz hopstand and 2.25 oz added through the boil and didn’t angle my dip tube. I did leave behind a small amount in the bottom of the kettle. Previously I did use one of These
http://choreboyscrubbers.com/en/Products/Ultimate_Scrubber_Stainless_Steel.aspx
over the bottom of the dip tube when i did the 115th Dream Hopbursted IPA because it had 16 oz of hops in the boil which was crazy and it actually worked pretty well to filter most of it out but I had a ton of sludge on the bottom of the kettle when I was all done and I’m sure I left some beer behind.
I would think from looking at my kettle that if I angled the tube I’d want some kind of extension on it to reach the outside edge of the kettle kinda like I’ve seen on pictures from MullerBrau’s setup. I’d be concerned without an extension about getting less out of the kettle if I angled the dip tube. You’d be increasing the distance from the tube to the bottom of the kettle and theoretically risk leaving more beer behind.
:cheers:
Rad
[quote=“Radagast”]
I would think from looking at my kettle that if I angled the tube I’d want some kind of extension on it to reach the outside edge of the kettle kinda like I’ve seen on pictures from MullerBrau’s setup. I’d be concerned without an extension about getting less out of the kettle if I angled the dip tube. You’d be increasing the distance from the tube to the bottom of the kettle and theoretically risk leaving more beer behind.
:cheers:
Rad[/quote]
Well my SOP now is to leave 0.5 gallons in the kettle to leave all that behind. The idea behind this would be i would still leave the 0.5 gallons behind due to the angling of the dip tube but if I let the trub settle, I would be getting a lot less of the trub. My concern is that there would be so much suction that it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
