DIY Hop back- Anyone used one?

Happy New Year everyone!

I am a self confessed hop head and love my hoppy brews. Following a bit of research into Hop backs, I tried my hand at putting one together with the end result in the pictures below. Does anyone have experience using a hop back? Do you feel it improves the hop flavour/aroma of your beer?What do your DIY Hop backs look like? Would love to hear opinions and see some pics of your efforts.

Cheers.

I use the kegland hop missile. Mix oat hells with the hop pellets.
It works. Most useful for other adjuncts in brews such as elderflower.

RoomWithABrew said:

I use the kegland hop missile. Mix oat hells with the hop pellets.
It works. Most useful for other adjuncts in brews such as elderflower.

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I’ve never used adjuncts like elderflower before but I have seen a recipe that uses spruce tips so it will be interesting to use the hop back for that and see how it turns out.

howyoubrewin said:

I’ve never used adjuncts like elderflower before but I have seen a recipe that uses spruce tips so it will be interesting to use the hop back for that and see how it turns out.

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I can see how you could use elderflower to emulate some of the really flowery hopped summer beers. Might give it a try in June if I get my timings right

jof said:

I can see how you could use elderflower to emulate some of the really flowery hopped summer beers. Might give it a try in June if I get my timings right

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I use it in an elderflower saison. Wanting to try it in a small dose in a east coast IPA. First time I made it I didn't have the hop missile so used the hop spider to contain it. Next time I just lobbed it in the kettle and it blocked the pump quicker than you can say " I shouldn't have done that". Lesson learnt.

Tried using a hop missile with my Brewzilla but found the pump wasn't good enough to use it properly, and also to use one in the way they are intended you need to utilise it as a single pass from your brew vessel through the hop back then chiller and into your fermenter at pitching temp in a single pass. The hypothesis being that by instantly cooling the wort once it's left the hop back and picked up the volatile hop oils they are 'locked' in and you lose less to evaporation. Its pointless recirculating from the hop back and back into your brew vessel at 80 degs or so for 20 mins as the you'll get evaporation of the hop goodness.

Only recently have I got my hands on a good enough plate chiller to enable me to do this so am looking to start using the hop missile again and see what's what.

Also looking to use the hop missile on the fermentation side for dry hopping so I idon'thave to drop the hops into the beer in the fermenter. I'm hoping I'll increase yield by recovering more of the absorbed beer under gravity and hopefully get better utilisation of the hops...

But hop backs are used extensively in the breweries that are famous for big hop forward beer styles so they are an effetive thing. Just wether you can make it work on the homebrew level sufficiently better than a more conventional hopstand and whirlpool. On one hand it should reduce brewing time as you don't need to steep your hops in the hopstand if you can pump through a chiller, also can make clean up a bit easier as you have less hop matter to clean out in your kettle...the hop missile/rocket fits nicely in the dishwasher!!

My guten 70 has a 20 litre per minute pump think it's 25w. It's a lot more powerful than the one I had in the robobrew 3.

I found that the flow rate was strong initially, but because more restricted over time until it dropped to a trickle. OK I'm using with pellet hops laced with rice hulls in a hop bag so maybe as the pellet hops break down and swell they might cause a greater restriction. Maybe more rice hulls can be used to counter this....however with more rice hulls you will impact utilisation defeating the purpose in the first place. Will probably work better with leaf hops.

I now have a larger brew system with a bigger 240v pump so will see how I get on. David Heath has already done some experimentation on this....

He does use the hop missile " backwards" in comparison to the instructions or the videos of others.
I'm not sure I noticed much difference trying it both ways.
Commercial use I've only seen examples at Harvey's and on TT video where it seems to be gravity fed and emptied.

Well I originally had a Kegland Hop Missile which is a carbon copy of the original Blichman Hop Rocket. When I pulled my larger 3-vessel system together from eBay I got a Blickmat hop rocket as part of the haul. The Hop Rocket has a sticker to show which direction the flow should be which is counter intuitive - i.e. input at the bottom and output at the cortical top, so I was using it upside down as I assumed you wanted to orientate it with the conical top pointing down to you can recover the wort volume under gravity. Seemed to work fine in that orientation save for my asthmatic pump. I suspect Blichman envisaged the vessel filing from the bottom enabling trapped air to be purged through the top. No harm in starting off in that orientation and inverting part way through the process or even at the end to recover the vessel wort volume.

In the fermentor recirculation loop I'm going to be trying the next brew I'm still using it upside down...

I used my mash tun as a hop back. Jury was undecided as to whether it improved aroma, but I think there was a better hop flavour rather than hop bitterness.

Hacksawbob said:

I used my mash tun as a hop back. Jury was undecided as to whether it improved aroma, but I think there was a better hop flavour rather than hop bitterness.

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Whole hops ?

Hacksawbob said:

I used my mash tun as a hop back. Jury was undecided as to whether it improved aroma, but I think there was a better hop flavour rather than hop bitterness.

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Well again I think you have to use it in a certain way to get the best out of it...i.e. flow wort through the hop back then directly into the chiller and then into the fermenter. If you're just recirculating back into the kettle then you're not doing anything fundamentally different to normal hopstand/whirlpool kettle additions.

Another benefit of them is that they act as a nice filter too and help get nice clear clean wort into the fermenter if that is important to you.

RoomWithABrew said:

Whole hops ?

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Yes whole hops. Im not sure it was worth the addittionial losses dues to the dead space under the mashtun plate. Ive worked in a brewpub chain one of the breweries had an hopback and it had a wonderful hop flavour and aroma dedpite using the same recipe snd ingredients as mine.