New Equipment

DrPaulsen · Post by **DrPaulsen** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 7:56 pm

For anyone who's interested, I posted pictures (and captions) of some new equipment I tried out today.

1. A false bottom for my boil kettle. I wanted to try not bagging my hops for a change and I have an eventual plan of finding a way to do a whirlpool with a bottom drain. The heavy mesh false bottom is step 1 to that plan. I am very impressed with how well the stainless steel false bottom works with leaf hops. It wouldn't do much for pellet hops without a couple ounces of leaf hops also in the kettle, but I suppose that's step 2 of my plan.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33275630@N ... 019444862/

2. Bucket insert filters. I picked up a couple of EZ Strainer filters that fit nicely into the lid of a fermenting bucket. My plan was to stack 400 um, 200 um, and 75 um filters and see how well they filtered out both protein and pellet hop material. The 400 and 200 um filters did a very good job of catching any hop material that made its way out of the kettle, but the 75 um filter got clogged by the protein. I might try inserting a 100 um filter in the stack someday, but for now I'd say this wasn't something I would recommend to anyone else.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33275630@N ... 019447912/

3. Big blow-off tubing. I was getting a lot of back-pressure, clogging, and squeeze-out leakage from around the rim of my standard fermenting bucket lids with a 1/2" ID blow-off tube. I figured I'd give a much bigger tube a shot after finding some bucket lids with a 1.25" pour spout. It's working so far, but the beer hasn't hit high krausen yet so we'll see. I should know more on the effectiveness of this approach in a day or two.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33275630@N ... 019441750/

DrPaulsen · Post by **DrPaulsen** » Sun Jun 24, 2012 10:56 pm

After one batch complete using the bucket lid with a pour spout and 1.25" blow-off tube, I'm impressed with how well it works. The lids seal really well, thanks to the o-ring, and the larger blow-off tubing didn't clog and create back-pressure like the 0.5" tubing I had been using previously. As a bonus, the pour spout has a threaded cap, which helps seal the fermentor when moving it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33275630@N ... 019441750/