I brewed the Brickwarmer Holiday Red and part of the instructions were to add orange peels at the end of the boil. When I syphoned the wort into the fermenter, I used a filter but it looks like some of the orange peels made it through (at least I assume that is what the orange colored pieces are). My next step is to move the beer to my keg - what is the best way to make sure that I do not get the orange pieces?
Should I use the funnel and filter - even though I am syphoning it? Should I take a sanitized spoon and scoop it out?
Zip tie a hop sock or Knee high stocking to the exit end of your siphon. Sanitize everything, and your siphon may clog a couple times, but you won’t be introducing alot of oxygen into your Ale.
PS I brewed this in September and was dissapointed with the final product. No orange. Then at the advice of John at NB I let it warm up a bit. At 45 degrees f. the orange appeared. dang I love what this hobby is teaching me.
On the orange peel topic, I’m on day two for fermentation for this beer. I read comments about orange peel issues and had the idea of just putting them into a hop bag. The hop bag I used has very tight fabric and fine filtration. Since it’s only day two, I wanted to crack the lid off my fermentation bucket just to ensure all is good and found that the hop bag had expanded like a balloon ready to pop, floating at the top. I sterilized my scissors and snipped a few slots in the hop bag and it sank down into the wort. I pushed some pockets of air/co2 out of the hop bag so it’s 98% submerged now and fermentation is looking great.
Next time I’ll do what’s been recommended and just skip the hop bag and filter out the orange peel at the time of racking to bottling bucket.
You’re right on. Just doesn’t allow for much circulation through the bag. It’s trash now so I’ll be using a hop spider or something without such a fine filtration quality.
I keep thinking about this what would cause the sack to expand? It has to be CO2 but if a gas can’t get out of the fabric how could yeast get through to ferment the peel. Unless wild yeast on the peel spurred fermentation. Did you sterilize the peel?
