Hop sock or no?

Following from How do you drain your bag? Do you use a hop sock or no?

I do, I use a sock I stitched myself from some left over voile and an old keg lid o-ring. it is around 300mm deep with a 100mm diameter.

I have tried the sock and without, with no noticeable difference in the resulting beer. However, when not using the sock, like this week when I used fresh picked hop flowers, my racking cane gets clogged.

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

I also use a hop sock made from left over voile. Because I no chill, I like to be able to pull the hops out, probably makes no difference, but in my head I'm limiting contact time with hot wort. I'm not sure that's how it works though

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

I think if I no-chilled or had a tap on my kettle and didn't use an immersion chiller I would definitely use a hop sock and my BIAB bag would be the sock I would use.

I chill, syphon and do have an immersion chiller. I no longer use a hop sock for the following reasons which I'll paraphrase from a post I made in a general thread here recently...

I mainly use pellet hops in my brews. I originally used to use the Craftbrewer hop bag but I found it awkward to suspend and then deal with when I was immersion chilling. I also had some fears on hop utilisation but never really noticed any difference on brews but this is a few years ago now.

I then went through a stage where I used my BIAB bag as my hop bag. A BIAB bag will work very well as a hop bag. It is certainly fine enough but has the advantage of being large and easily suspended if you have a skyhook. I certainly would use my BIAB bag in preference to the above. I stuck with this method for quite a while but it still annoyed me when I got to the immersion chilling stage .

I now just throw all my hops into the kettle and this works well with my set-up.

I'm not much of a chemist and I might well be imagining that I have read somewhere that free hops might attract some undesirables and then help them drop out of the wort upon chilling??? This could well be pure fiction and, even if true, like so many things in brewing, I am not sure how many of us would actually be capable of tasting any such difference in the resulting beer.

Another interesting topic for us and already great reading - thanks hashie

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

Nowadays if I'm using a fairly light hop bill like say 50g I'll just put the pellets into the boil and they floc out with the hot break at the end, before I run into the cube.

For larger quantities I use a fairly large grain bag (not as big as the BIAB bag) which I peg round the outside of the urn and the hops - flowers and pellet material - use it as their own personal swimming pool and get a good boil around as the steam has to escape through the bag, nowhere else to go. This photo doesn't do it justice as they do swirl and broil around.

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

This is interesting...

Beachbum, the bag you are using as a hopsock is a lot coarser than my BIAB bag. I have a wide kettle (45 cm) so it has a high evaporation rate on a single batch though it is spot on for a double batch. One thing I did a while back to reduce evaporation on my single brews was to do as you have done above - I 'hung' my bag over the sides. I stopped doing this and, for the life of me, can't remember why though there would have been some sort of reason.

I suspect I might have been worried that my bag was so fine it would not allow volatile oils etc to escape from the boil. I also seem to remember the bag constantly 'floating' to the top of the wort. With your porosity bag though, I wouldn't think these things would be less of a problem if a problem at all?


PP

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

argon5000 wrote:I've given up using the hop sock... i think the last batch i did came out a little muted, at least based on the amount of hops that went in.

I like the idea of the loose hop bag though... even using my BIAB bag as a "sock".

I'm doing a triple batch bo pils 100% saaz soon, which requires over 400g of pellets. So i'll report back on how it goes using the bag in the kettle

Argon: from another forum, I'm also doing a Bo Pils tomorrow with a shedload of Saaz. Because I no chill using a cube I'm a bit worried about loss of aroma and will be using your method of:

Reserve the Saaz that would go in as a 10 minute addition
Run wort off into cube and then chill down to 4° in cube
Take about 2L of wort and boil the reserved Saaz for 10 mins

Pour the whole lot into the fermenter to hit a good pitching temperature. As I'm in Australia where all Saaz are pellets (flowers not let in) I won't be using a hop sock - it all flocs out with the yeast and break anyway as long as the wort is given enough time to settle well after boiling. I seal off the kettle with a clean towel over the top anyway so no problem giving it half an hour to settle. Cube is well sanitised with Starsan so little chance of infection, and also pitch next day anyway.

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

Thanks to Argon's method - which I attribute this to - at the Brisbane Amateur Beer Brewers American Ales mini comp last night, my American Pale Ale came third in the comp
Places were one and two to American IPAs and around 20 - 23 APA's got entered so that would make my entry #1 in the APAs

Main points were scored on aroma, flavour and overall impression with "piney, citrussy,resiny....." stressed. Thanks Argon.
On topic for the thread the main hop methods were:

• Kettle hop additions went in commando style with no hop sock
  The 10 min addition was made next day by boiling 3L of wort out of the nochill cube
  There was a 30g Cascade dry hop addition.

Clarity was perfect and very little loss to crud in the fermenter. I'm sold.

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

I've got a full virgin keg of the brew sitting in my kegerator at the moment, unmolested for the last two weeks So you will be attending my brew day Saturday week won't you.

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0