I am preparing to do a brew today. I usually put my hops in hop bags and discard them after the boil. If I don’t use the bags, and after the boil I just dump the entire contents into the fermenter, trub, hops and all, will this be bad? Will the trub in the fermenter for 3 weeks cause trouble?
After boil, when i add to fermenter bucket, i run it through a strainer. Removes a lot, and you will still end up with trub on bottom after fermentation.
Sorry, to answer your question. in my experience, and im fairley new to brewing, it should not hurt it.
Thank you. I will hope for additional responses. Not that I don’t value yours, but there’s safety in gathering a large response pool.
I know there are ways of removing trub, but I am specifically trying to determine if leaving it in there is going to hurt my beer.
No problem at all having all the hop debris in the fermentor. If you plan to age your beer for 2 months or longer then a secondary might be a consideration.
As has been said before, no problem leaving the trub in the fermenter for any reasonable time, up to 6-8 weeks in my opinion.
cool
I would strain it out or use a hop bag if you’re reusing the yeast.
Not reusing the yeast. I finished the brew and it’s all in the fermenter. Gonna let it ride!
I read recently that that is one of the causes of bad head retention. Carrying over “too much” trub. Trub contains a lot of lipids (fats) which hinder head qualities.
As a sidenote, I always try to let at least a cup-pint of trub into the fermenter, as I have read it contains nutrients helpful to yeast activity.
IOW, I compromise but lean towards less trub = better beer.
[quote=“beermebeavis”]I read recently that that is one of the causes of bad head retention. Carrying over “too much” trub. Trub contains a lot of lipids (fats) which hinder head qualities.
As a sidenote, I always try to let at least a cup-pint of trub into the fermenter, as I have read it contains nutrients helpful to yeast activity.
IOW, I compromise but lean towards less trub = better beer.[/quote]
I haven’t heard that before. Do you have a reference.
cannot recall for sure – I read a lot, and I read a lot of different places.
Made sense to me, though. --I am merely a blue-collar, amateur homebrewer though. Not a scientist. Albeit I am a BJCP judge and an experienced brewer.
I typically strain out what I can because I harvest yeast more times than not. It won’t hurt a thing with all of that “stuff” going into the fermenter. If I have a lot of hops (IPA, etc) I certainly try and get out what I can. In fact, I’ll use a mesh hop bag and “squeeze” it out after cooling the wort. It’s amazing how much hops soak up.
I run my cooled wort thru a paint strainer bag from kettle to fermenter. I’ll save spent yeast/trub for future batches. I have bought new pure strains and used saved trub from same yeast strains and can’t tell the diff. in same recipe beers. I did this purposely as a test for myself. I don’t worry about it anymore, not to say I don’t keep checking. Another good reason to keep notes for ref.
So the reason I wanted to pour the whole mess into the fermenter is that I find it very difficult to get all the wort out of the kettle. So It seem wasteful to leave any behind. This is my first attempt at just dumping the whole thing and I hope it turns out great. I wonder if the commercial breweries filter out the hops and trub? I know they don’t use hop bags. I have seen the process on TV a few times and I always see them just dumping in the big bucket of hops. So I know it’s all in the wort when they transfer. I would find it hard to believe that they would take the time and effort to get all that out, and it would seem that they would not want to lose all that wort because they cant separate it.
I am straining the hop debris during the pour into the fermentor. I started doing this to harvest cleaner yeast. At first I used the big white funnel, with built in screen. The screen clogged rapidly and had to be repeatedly dumped. I now strain through a grain bag that rests in the funnel. My wife helps hold the funnel and bag as I pour. As the bottom of the bag fills, the wort drains through the sides. Occasionally the funnel screen clogs, but my wife’s sanitized fingers reopen it.
I never had any off flavors, or poor fermentations, from having the beer sit on the hop debris in the fermentor.
I’m a big fan of the hop bag and I don’t see any difference in taste. I brewed a batch of Caribou Slobber a couple of weeks ago didn’t use a hop bag and there was a huge amount of waste when I transferred the wort the the fermentor. On Saturday I transferred to a carboy and threw out even more. Yesterday I used a hop bag for some Irish Ale and there was hardly any trub. I also whirlpool really well which helps a lot.
The big breweries use special whirlpool devices to separate the trub from the wort. Very efficient, but not something a homebrewer could get. NOT the same as a homebrewer’s whirlpool in the kettle before draining.
The guy at brulosophy.com did an experiment on this topic, and it stood out because unlike the majority of experiments he’s done, this one seemed to make a difference. He found that the majority of his taste test group prefered the beer fermented on a lot of trub, though the reasons were not entirely consistent.
Some very good reads on that site.
[quote=“rebuiltcellars”]The guy at brulosophy.com did an experiment on this topic, and it stood out because unlike the majority of experiments he’s done, this one seemed to make a difference. He found that the majority of his taste test group prefered the beer fermented on a lot of trub, though the reasons were not entirely consistent.
Some very good reads on that site.[/quote]
The same results were reported maybe 10 years before that by a guy on the Brews and Views forum. I love Marshall’s experiences and appreciate the effort that goes into them, but I find a lot of them just go over things that were confirmed before he got into brewing. One of the upsides of being an old guy like me!
