Using water filter as a hoprocket / randal thingie when tran

The Homebrew Forum

Help Support The Homebrew Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

barkar

Active Member
Joined
Mar 31, 2010
Messages
99
Reaction score
0
I have 10' water filter thingie that i intended to use for filtering my beer from fermenter before conditioning ie iforce carbonate so dont need any of the yeast to condition sugars in the keg .
I was thinking if using a randal contraption thingie when transfering to the keg , the filter i have has a hollow centre so i could stuff this full of hops . I was hoping to use pellet hops . Would you think that the contact time would be sufficient to impart better aroma etc. The filter is 5 micron i think
 
I have eb, but not as a hop back. Mine is here I've used both a 10" a 5" housing, my use was as a in line pre filter prior to a gasket plate heat exchanger. I'm now in the process of converting a Blichmann hop rocket using 0.4 micron mesh to cover the inner perforated tube, again for the same purpose. If I were to do it in a water filter as a hop back I'd use thinner perforated tube in the centre and have the hops on the outside, to increase the amount of hops you can use. You mention using a 5um filter to remove yeast...I'm pretty sure (going of memory) that this is too big for that purpose.
 
Thanks for the link. What sort of pSI are these units rated to. Might consider using as well inline between keg and tap for an existing beer, re the yeast particles I have read some where that yeast cells are the size of 5 Micron , don't know how true this is , more concerned about imparting yeast aroma without having pellet debris in the brew. Would you think this would work on a gravity transfer , I have an auto syphon and wad hoping to put the filter between the fv and the final keg
 
Realise I said yeast aroma I meant hop aroma, typing on a tiny smartphone :roll:
 
I done some work on this last night , i have some 40# mesh which i have rolled in to the middle section of the filter so between this and the 5 micron filter i imagine i shoudl be ok re hops debri even using pellets , Anyone concur ?
 
#40 is the most commonly used for hop screens when pellets are involved, I've used it without issues. It depends how far you want to go, depending on your phe plate type (if you use one) you will have different sized gaps, my manufacturer recommended .25um on coolant feed and product.
 
I have also used it with out problems when transfering to a heat exchanger although i do get a bit of cold break coming through. I will be usnig for trasnfering to a keg so would the contact time of the hops be sufficient for dry hopping?
 
Just a further update , was testing it yesterday , cleaning etc. i ran fluid through it , while this was fine with gravity feed i noticed 2 things

1. cylinder doesnt fill completely with the fluid, with oxy there seemed to be excessive foaming and bubbles which leaves me wondering about excessive oxidation when trasnfering ie , i hade the filter set up below the fluid level , i dont have anyway of purging the air out of the chamber completely, ie ther eis no pressure release valve on it

2. Flow was fine but i would imagine this might be hard to get going etc with hops clogging it up
 
I believe the contact time should be sufficient to impart a nice hop character to your beer.

As I understand it you are suggesting placing the pellet hops within the hollow inner cylindrical space of your canister type water filter.

If this is indeed the case I don't believe this will work.

Placing the hops within the center of the filter will not impart the beer with hop character but rather adds the hops directly to the keg along with the beer.

As I understand it the filter works as follows. The beer in enters the plastic housing (typically blue colored) from the top and then enters the filter. It then flows through the filter comes out within the inner cylindrical space of the filter. The beer then flows upward and out for the housing and into your waiting keg or pint glass.

There should be space outside the cylindrical filter to place the hops there.

That should work though I am a bit concerned that the hop pellets will clog the filter. Even if you replace your filter canister with the coarsest mess filter available I suspect this still could be a problem especially since you are using gravity rather than CO2 to push the beer through the system.

Switching to whole hops would likely work much better in this regard. However with only the force of gravity to drive things I worry that the process may be painfully slow.

You might consider imparting hop character during dispensing with a proper Randall type system.

I used to filter my beer with a canister filter that sounds very similar to the one you have . I had some friends who were put off by cloudy beer so I used filtered my homebrew. Well I got new friends and stopped wasting my time with filtering.

The filter was sitting on the shelf for years until I came across some plans on the Maltose Falcon's webpage for making a smaller version of Dogfish Head's Randall the Enamel Animal.

I considered doing as I propose here with the whole hops and just use my filter as is. However, I decided against it simply because without the filter cleaning ups would be a breeze. Back flushing the filter with sanitizer after each use was bad enough but I never particularly liked air drying it. That always seemed like asking for trouble.

At any rate, here is the address for the Randall instructions: http://www.maltosefalcons.com/clubgear/hash-back-aka-moormanator.

These instructions are for making a system from scratch so you will need to alter them some.

With such as system you could either use it during dispensing or run it into a keg as you proposed.

I suspect that you may be able to use hop pellets as well if you were to place some of the fine wire mess over the central stainless steel tube. It could probably be held in place with a cable tie or perhaps simply a plastic coated twist tie. For use with pellets you would also probably want to drill far more holes in than the instructions call for.

Here is what my Hop-O-Matic, as I call it, looks like:

Hop-O-Matic_small.jpg


I hope this helps

- Scott
 

Latest posts

Back
Top