Beer Forum

I use a 200 micron filter bag on my hop spider and have begun to wonder if it is too fine to let the hop goodness flavor the boiling wort. To my pallet, it seems like flavor and aroma is missing, despite long hop stands post boil.

I went with 200 micron to keep my plate chiller clean.

For those of you using spiders - what size bag are you using?

Is 200 micron too fine?

I have no idea on the micron bag, but what do you mean by a "long hop stand". As far as I understand it, you dont want a long hop stand for aroma. The longer it sits in 170+ wort, the less aroma and more bitterness you will get.

Not sure what your process is, so sorry if I misunderstood what you said.

Maybe that's my process problem, letting the hops steep for an hour or more at below boiling temps. Perhaps I should chill quicker or add the aroma hops before chilling.

Definitely. Same theory as a hop back. Hit the wort with hops then chill immediately to lock in the hop aroma and some flavor.

Well, that's it then. In Las Vegas, my ground water doesn't cool-down that much. I tend to let the keggle cool (covered) down before running it through the plate chiller.

Maybe I should just dry hop the zero edition hops instead. That should give me what I need.

I know Jamil talked about this when he started Heretic. He was saying that on his homebrew system he could get it chilled in 15 minutes or so, and on the pro system knock out was taking an 1.5 hours. He was saying that the massive amounts of late hops were adding too much bitterness because of the long hot stand. I believe he moved a lot of it to dry hop, but stated that it was a different taste.

Since you are waiting a while for it to cool down, you could do some late (whirl-pool hops) right before you run through the plate chiller. As long as you are over 170 (I think that is the magic number) you should get the same results.

The fermentation blows-off some of the aroma right? Why not just opt for the dry hop vs. the flameout addition? The bittering contribution @ 170-180 is small anyhow ...

The CYBI Arrogant Bastard for example calls for 85/45/15/0 nearly 4 oz. of Chinook total. With my process, flavor or aroma from the 15 and 0 is gone. Wouldn't 2 oz. at 90 and 2 oz. dry hopping produce similar results than the 85/45/15/0 with a quick chill?

Not really sure. Fermentation definitely will blow off some aromatics. I do believe there is a difference in dry hop vs flame out additions. Dry hopping will give you the most bang for your buck in terms of aromatics though. It would be interesting to do a side by side, same wort, hoping one at 60/15/0/dry hop and the other at 60/dry hop using the same hops in each. I wonder if anyone has done this yet.