I'm also fan of Festival kits and dry-hopping. Not, though, a fan of the little nylon muslin type hop-filter bags Festival provide to filter trub/hops when syphoning. But I've found the solution!
I use an auto-syphon to transfer brew from FV into bottling bucket, but the little hop-filter bags used to regularly get so gunked up during transfer that flow rate often slowed to an absolute standstill.
Pressure differential from blocked filters could be so much during transfer as to cause CO2 to come out of solution, breaking vacuum and syphon flow, requiring frequent repriming - and much loss of hair.
Last straw for me was a transfer of Vienna Red Lager which took about a dozen restarts over two hours of syphoning. Nearly resorted to using a jug in a desperate bid to rescue what I thought was a subsequently ruined brew from oxidation. (Brew actually survived - hair did not!)
So, I bought a stainless steel 300 micron mesh hop spider. (Cost £5-£20 depending on size). This investment was, for me, an absolute game changer! Worth every penny in alleviating my usual and regular bottling process stress.
I still dry hop without it. In that any dry hopping cones/pellets are chucked into the FV bucket loose as before. But when racking the final brew into my bottling bucket, I now hook the spider onto the lip of the open FV brew bucket and syphon the settled clear brew from inside the hop spider mesh cylinder.
The large surface area mesh of the spider never blocks, and flow rate of transfer is now much, much faster. I unhook the spider towards the end of the transfer, resting the bottom of it gently onto the sediment as I tilt the FV to allow the syphon to get to the bottom of the clear settled and undisturbed brew.
What was an occasionally challenging process is now reliably straight forward. Racking a 23 litre brew into my bottling bucket now takes me as little as 2 minutes to transfer all but the last 200ml of trub and hops, delivering reliably clear brew into my bottling bucket and minimising the chance of oxidation in the process.
Wish I'd known about such kit and used one years ago. Hopefully paying forward here to help others struggling with same!
I use an auto-syphon to transfer brew from FV into bottling bucket, but the little hop-filter bags used to regularly get so gunked up during transfer that flow rate often slowed to an absolute standstill.
Pressure differential from blocked filters could be so much during transfer as to cause CO2 to come out of solution, breaking vacuum and syphon flow, requiring frequent repriming - and much loss of hair.
Last straw for me was a transfer of Vienna Red Lager which took about a dozen restarts over two hours of syphoning. Nearly resorted to using a jug in a desperate bid to rescue what I thought was a subsequently ruined brew from oxidation. (Brew actually survived - hair did not!)
So, I bought a stainless steel 300 micron mesh hop spider. (Cost £5-£20 depending on size). This investment was, for me, an absolute game changer! Worth every penny in alleviating my usual and regular bottling process stress.
I still dry hop without it. In that any dry hopping cones/pellets are chucked into the FV bucket loose as before. But when racking the final brew into my bottling bucket, I now hook the spider onto the lip of the open FV brew bucket and syphon the settled clear brew from inside the hop spider mesh cylinder.
The large surface area mesh of the spider never blocks, and flow rate of transfer is now much, much faster. I unhook the spider towards the end of the transfer, resting the bottom of it gently onto the sediment as I tilt the FV to allow the syphon to get to the bottom of the clear settled and undisturbed brew.
What was an occasionally challenging process is now reliably straight forward. Racking a 23 litre brew into my bottling bucket now takes me as little as 2 minutes to transfer all but the last 200ml of trub and hops, delivering reliably clear brew into my bottling bucket and minimising the chance of oxidation in the process.
Wish I'd known about such kit and used one years ago. Hopefully paying forward here to help others struggling with same!
Last edited: