frankvw
Well-Known Member
After full grain brewing for years I have now begun to experiment with recipes based on extract and steeped grains in a partial boil. You know the drill: you make a small volume (1 gal. or so) of wort from some extract and steeped grains, making sure it has the same gravity as the OG of the final wort volume should have (in order to keep your hop utilization where it belongs) and you boil that 1 gallon with all your hops, then top it up with water and more extract to a larger volume (4 gal or so) and let ferment. There are limits to how far you can scale your boil down but in general it works fairly well, and the advantage is that you can do this in a relatively small pot on the kitchen stove.
The disadvantage is that with 1 gal. of wort your trub losses are far more significant than they would be in 4 gal. of wort. I tried to brew a highly hopped beer with an OG of 1.050 the other day, and about 1/3 of the wort had so much trub in it that it was as thick as mud. Some filtration warranted here.
Which brings my to my question: how to you all deal with the keep to have whatever filtering method you use sanitized? I'm considering using a sieve or colander lined with cheese cloth (I have some with a coarse weave that looks like it will do the job) but it will have to be sanitized. Soaking it in sanitizer should do the trick, but would mean to introduce significant amounts of sanitizing agent into my wort. Boiling water would be an option, but handling the stuff steaming hot could get tricky.
So how do you all deal with the sanitation of whatever you use for filtering the crud out of your wort?
The disadvantage is that with 1 gal. of wort your trub losses are far more significant than they would be in 4 gal. of wort. I tried to brew a highly hopped beer with an OG of 1.050 the other day, and about 1/3 of the wort had so much trub in it that it was as thick as mud. Some filtration warranted here.
Which brings my to my question: how to you all deal with the keep to have whatever filtering method you use sanitized? I'm considering using a sieve or colander lined with cheese cloth (I have some with a coarse weave that looks like it will do the job) but it will have to be sanitized. Soaking it in sanitizer should do the trick, but would mean to introduce significant amounts of sanitizing agent into my wort. Boiling water would be an option, but handling the stuff steaming hot could get tricky.
So how do you all deal with the sanitation of whatever you use for filtering the crud out of your wort?