Clogged hop filter problem

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Sinbad95

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Hi, I am after some advice about draining wort from the kettle to fv. I have recently got in to home brew again after a long break and did my first non-kit brew last weekend. It was the Elderflower Ale extract recipe from the revised Home Brew Beer book by Greg Hughes. I am using a homemade boiler (plastic bucket with kettle elements and a copper pipe with slits cut as a filter for draining via a tap), everything went well until it came time to drain the boiler into the fv. Immediately the tap was blocked, I had to resort to constantly agitating the wort to get a trickle and as the level got lower I had to lift the boiler and shake it until I drained 22 litres of wart (1 litre down on my target). Upside is I got a well agitated wort in the fv but the downside of a hell of a lot of trub. It’s fermenting well and smells good but a few weeks until I can pass judgement on it. I am keen to do my next brew but need to resolve the blockage issue. I have looked at hop spiders but a lot of people report loss of hop flavours and bittering. Wondering if a muslin bag might be better. I appreciate any advice you can offer. Thanks.
 
Was it hop blockage, grain trub or both? If it is hop blockage a hop spider will help with this and is not too much of a problem as long as you are not doing very hoppy beers where it is in the kettle, you could shift more of it to a dry hop that would also help if you are doing very hoppy beers also stirring the hops in the hop spider will also help to get the flavour of the hops out, you could also add slightly more hops to compensate as well. If it is trub and grain matter you have already suggested the answer with a BIAB bag in the kettle lust don't let it touch the elements by putting in a false bottom or using a upturned colander or the likes but make some slots for it to go around the elements so it is not resting on them. The trub could be excessive due to the grain crush also which does happen sometimes if you buy it pre-crushed if that is the issue you could change your supplier if it is consistently too fine a crush but I think we have all had that one bag of grain from our regular supplier that somehow is crushed finer even though they say nothing has changed. Ps if you do BIAB it generally needs a finer crush anyway
 
Thanks The Baron, some very good advice. The blockage is the hops and maybe break matter, the recipe was with DME ( I haven’t progressed to whole grain yet :D). I am going to give the muslin bags a try and see if that works for me, failing that a false bottom of an old colander sounds promising.
BTW, I just took a gravity reading, day 7, and it has reached 1.012 so looks like it has fermented well. The taste is still quite bitter but hopefully that would round out with the conditioning over the next 4 week.
Thanks again for the advice. acheers.
 
Just a little update , I did a 2nd brew today, very hop heavy recipe (200g), without issue draining. I did a few things differently. 1st I only used half a protofloc tablet, 2nd I gave a good stir after chilling and waited 5 minutes to try to ‘centre’ the hops and 3rd I swapped the slotted copper pipe hop filter for a braided hose running round the bottom of the boiler.
 

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