Brewery bling - stainless hopscreen

[Duncan]

I just received a package from BeerBelly in Adelaide, which I thought may interest some of you.

The star of the show is a stainless steel hopscreen, for the outlet of my kettle.  They have several options available, but I went with the full S/S option with pick-up tube, and damn it is sexy.  The craftsmanship is second to none - I can't spot a single flaw in any of the welding, and with the included pickup tube it just screws onto the inside of my bulkhead.

Two photos attached;  A close up (with a matchbox for scale), and in place inside the kettle.

The reviews I've read say that it will easily handle IIPA quantities of pellets without blocking - I'll report back when I try it in the coming weeks.

BeerBelly is a husband and wife team - Wayne is the fabricator and Amanda runs the shop.  Because they are small there is often a lead-time on orders (not helped by Wayne injuring himself shortly before I placed my order) but they seem to have caught up on the backlog and the website says most things are in stock again now.

http://www.beerbelly.com.au

I should mention that I am in no way affiliated with them, just a happy customer - I bought my gas burners from them last year too.  The only downer is they are in Adelaide, so the postage can be fairly steep depending on the size/weight.  Given they are small I thought some of you may not have heard of them.

[John Pagler]

Hi Duncan

Have you used the Beerbelly hopscreen yet, it looks a nice piece of kit

Cheers

John

[Duncan]

Hi John,

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you - I've been traveling for the last couple of weeks and have tried to reply a couple of times from my phone, but it wasn't having it.

I have used the hopscreen once a couple of weeks ago for an oatmeal stout.  It didn't have a lot of hops (a total of 55gm pellets) so I didn't exactly try to push it, but it worked perfectly.  I use a plate chiller to cool the wort, and on brew day it was pretty hot so I transferred from the kettle very slowly to get maximum heat transfer, which meant I didn't really test the throughput of the hop screen either.  Even after using irish moss, and whirlpooling, there were still floaters in the kettle, but the wort going into the kettle was very clear (albeit very dark).

I've attached a pic of the bottom of the kettle after transferring.  It was completely covered in hops/ trub, but the liquid still flowed well.

I plan to brew an IPA in the next couple of weeks which will have significantly more hops, so I'll report back after that.

Duncan.