How do you minimize the trub in your Catalyst?

[Dr. T.]

With a valve at the bottom specifically made for removing trub/yeast, my question seems silly.

What I mean is, after your wort has cooled, how do you minimize the trub getting to your beer. Here are a two options I've tried:

1. Rack or carefully transfer cooled wort to Catalyst, leaving behind as much settled proteins and other gunk as possible
2. Dump ALL of it to the catalyst, wait about 24h and remove trub using a large jar.

I used to work hard at not transferring yucky stuff to the catalyst after cooling the wort, but lately favor the... just dump it all.

Thoughts?

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

what I do on my anvil is brew a bigger batch and let it all transfer to the fermenter, the trub settles to the bottom and because of the extra beer; only clear beer goes to my keg

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

you might have to dump the catalyst several times but that's ok in my book

 

[loganklaas]

I’ve got two Catalysts and love them. Do you use hop bags when you’re brewing? That significantly reduces the amount of trub/sediment that is left in the bottom of your brew pot when you dump it all into your Catalyst. I then dump the 16oz trub jar after one week.

 

[hotbeer]

I'm waiting for my first conical to arrive, but I think that @Ozarks_Mountain_Brew is correct, you just plan your quantity going to the fermenter to be enough to let you dump as often as needed and still leave you with the quantity you want to bottle or keg.

Certainly anything you can do to your wort to strain out what you can't whirlpool out with use of finings like whirlfloc or just let settle with time before pouring into the fermenter will help.... some. Yeast seems to make a lot all by itself.

I don't overly worry about it though. If it's trub in the fermenter, it'll be trub in the bottle or keg and I can take steps to minimize it getting in my glass.

 

[brewbama]

I whirlpool to cool so get relatively small amount of trüb in the fermenter. My fermenter has a cone below the spigot so any trüb I do transfer settles into the cone.

 

[Dr. T.]

I did use a hop bag, and that greatly reduced trub. I used whirlfloc, whirlpooled on cooling... and really didn't have a lot of dense trub that fell to the bottom - so I dumped it all into the catalyst. I got rid of the first trub jar after about 8 hours and before pitching yeast. Since then I think I've been mostly collecting yeast. I used two dry yeast packets and a starter, so I have a ton of yeast to settle out. I've dumped three jars over the last two weeks of mostly yeast. I think I'm about done (whew!) with the yeast settling and am close to being able to bottle. My biggest worry about frequent trub dumps out of the catalyst is the frequent introduction of oxygen. I've even considered dropping a piece of dry ice into the clean jar to push out O2 before I attach it to the catalyst, but haven't gotten anal about it yet

 

[hotbeer]

If you dump the majority of the trub while the fermentation is actively producing a lot of CO2, then you'll minimize the effects of air intrusion.

If you google about it, I've read some interesting ways some have devised to further minimize O2 from suck-back getting into the conical when dumping it.

 

[loganklaas]

With the Catalyst, any widemouth mason jar fits on it. If your goal is to reduce the amount of times you dump the trub jar, start with a 32 ounce jar instead of the 16 ounce one it comes with. I have 32oz, 16oz, and 8oz, depending on the batch, where it’s at in the fermentation process, and how much more trub I think it will produce.

 

[loganklaas]

Very timely post from Craft A Brew for you: