Dropping yeast on heavily dry hopped beers

[coastbrew]

Hey guys,

We are having issues with dropping yeast on our heavily dry hopped NE IPA. We use about 15 lbs of dry hops for a 7bbl batch (we often get about 1000L out of the kettle though) and 1318 London Ale III yeast. The dry hops are split into two charges: first charge of dry hops goes in about 1-2 Plato from terminal, and the second at terminal. Both charges of dry hops are at 67F. After the second charge goes in and the fv is done off gassing, we cap it and leave it at 67 for 3-4 days before dropping the temp to 38F. We don't repitch this yeast when we brew this beer because of the dry hop... so for this one we are basically just dumping the hops, yeast and trub into a bin before transferring the beer to a brite tank.

For all of our other beers, including some that are fairly heavily dry hopped but with US05 yeast and also including others that are not dry hopped but with the same 1318 yeast strain our SOP for dropping yeast works fine. Off of the bottom outlet of the FV we will throttle a ball valve and either go straight out of a 90 into a pan or if it punches through too quickly we will choke it down with a tc x 1/2" barb fitting and run the yeast through a 1/2" silicone hose into a bin. For the NE IPA the 1/2" hose gets clogged up really quickly or beer just punches through. So it ends up adding several days onto the fermentation schedule to get the beer into the brite tank. Any suggestions for getting the hops/yeast/trub out of the fermentor more easily would be much appreciated!

Thanks.

[UnFermentable]

I would suggest removing as much yeast as possible before adding your dry hops. The weight of the 2lbs/bbl can compact the yeast cake and make pulling a hole much more likely. If you have a shallow cone, that can increase the likelihood as well.

At 1-2*P before final, it is likely a lot of your yeast has already dropped, and you can get it out of the tank to prevent more compacting by the dry hops.

Make sure you open the valve enough in the beginning to get motion, and carefully throttle the vale to make sure you don't stop the flow. Go as slow as possible while keeping the movement and you shouldn't have much issue. I use a 1" for yeast harvest (and trub out afterwards), but have never needed to go down smaller if watching the flow rate. Add a little pressure to the top of the tank if needed, but you shouldn't need much if done right.

[coastbrew]

Thanks for the reply, I will give that a try for the next batch.

[jawsfree]

diaphragm valve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg_gkx9ldOA