Hello brewies,
I’m trying to come up with a neat way to implement the whirlpool in my simple homebrew process. I do brew-in-a-bag in a large kettle that has a faucet / tap thing at the very bottom of the kettle. What happens is that I mash with the BIAB bag in the kettle, lift the bag out of the kettle into a straining contraption, get the kettle to boil, boil with hops and whatnot and after the boil is done, run the wort into the fermenter via said tap through a metal coffee filter cone.
Now if I could somehow get the wort to whirl around while running into the fermenter, the whirlpool effect would concentrate any gunk into the center of the whirlpool and the stuff coming out of the tap, located at the edge of the whirlpool, would give cleaner wort.
I could put together a bespoke stirrer, of course, but I’m looking for a crafty solution with common household items first, those are always preferred :) The solution must be hands-free and account for the fact that the level of wort in the kettle obviously goes down during the operation.
Magnetic stirrer probably wouldn’t work because the kettle is stainless steel. A regular home mixer ran with one beater would tie up one hand (and having to hold it would probably mean some foreign material like cat hair off the sleeve in the wort). I’m also wary of doing it with a circulation pump like the commercial homebrew automaticksch do, because wort is hot and cleaning the pump and pipes is too much work.
But I’m sure Lemmy has the compound genius to solve this :D
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You don’t need to stir it continuously!
Use hand stirrer (I have big wooden spoon for commercial kitchens), stir it for a minute (unti you see vortex forming), let it sit for ~5 minutes and then open the tap (at this point it wouldn’t be whirling around that much). You really need to let it sit to make the “hop cake” at the bottom of your kettle.
It works the same in commercial brewing settups. Just the times are longer and it is stirred by some pump.
So you don’t need anything special, I have basically the same settup as you and do it that way for 5+ years and it doesn’t need to be “hands-free solution”.
This comment right here, Santa Claus :D
Thanks a ton! Makes perfect sense, this is what I will be doing from here on.
To pay it back a bit - I have a trick that reduces the hops gunk a great deal already. Couldn’t find a pic of the product itself, but I put hop pellets in large tea infusion bags. The pic there at least shows the size. Clip the end shut with something, maybe put a glass or steel ball in there for weight if you need them to sink. I just let them float, the boil will roll them around. One bag takes only 15 - 20 g of hop pellets due to swelling, so there will be several bags in the kettle.
If you do it right, you don’t need to use those. In my experience straining it through something like this bag (I use bag for dry hopping or diaper) is enough. You just have to let it drain slowly to not disturb the “hop cake”.
Pump to recirculate from the tap and back in to tbe kettle and then attach the hose to the edge of the kettle at an angle with a clamp. Works just fine and is cheap and handles variable amounts of wort.
