Open Hop Back

[newbuffalo]

Hello,

We are in the process of setting up a new 3-vessel 30bbl system and had ordered a 4bbl Hop Back. The design isn't what we are use to. We had expected a pressure vessel that you fill and pull wort from the whirlpool, though the hop back and on to the chiller. There design is like a gaint wort gant, that is gravity feed then throttle the put to keep it full. My concerns are someone screwing up the pull rate and spilling the wort and hurting themselves and also the extra exposer to the air. Does anyone have experience with this style hop back?

Bill

[dick murton]

The first question has got to be - what is the purpose of the so called hop back. The whirlpool should work well enough to be able to pump straight from whirlpool to the chiller, so a separate strainer system should not be required. Having said that, if you whirlpool doesn't work properly, then a final strainer would be useful. If you want to add hop aroma, then I consider this way too small. Traditional British hopbacks would be big enough to hold the entire contents of the wort kettle, plus a little extra for additional late hops , and would be fitted with a sparge arm to wash extract out of the hops. An open system simply means you have to spend more time controlling the feed and take off of the hopback / strainer, but does give the possibility of small additional late hop aromas.

[mmussen]

I spent some time working at a brewery in England that had an open hop back - It was quite large (and was actually an old mash tun). They would pump hot wort in through the sparge and then draw off from underneath the screens at the same rate. The system had the pumps linked together to make sure that the hop back wouldn't overfill.
That being said the mash tun was designed for a brew length half the size of their brewhouse, so a fair bit larger than yours. O2 pickup wasn't an issue but the vast majority of the beer was sold on cask very quickly so long term age problems never showed up.

[Bainbridge]

My concerns are someone screwing up the pull rate and spilling the wort and hurting themselves and also the extra exposer to the air. Does anyone have experience with this style hop back?

Bill

Yep, you'll have to watch it like a hawk until you get a sense for the valve and pump flow rates. We have an open one, though it's about 1.5bbls, and even though we can only fit about 5lbs of fluffed out leaf hops in for a 10bbl batch it does make a difference and does help us get a little more and cleaner yield out of our hoppy beers (whirlpool only does so-so after a certain amount of hops go in there). I've thought about putting some kind of float valve in that would make it function more like a grant and solve the overflow problem but...eh.

Where it does excel though is as a CIP grant and parts tub. Very useful sometimes to have a big ass open tub with triclamps on it sometimes.