Hops and yeast

[Ian]

I would really appreciate your sagely and experienced thoughts on a matter guys - two matters I suppose, but closely related, so I hope I'm in line treating this as one topic.
Briefly, by way of background, I have a mate in WA who is a passionate and veteran Full mash brewer (in fact he and two partners have a small commercial brewery as an additional business to their 'day jobs') and it is he who has nudged me to the brink of the reverent pursuit of AG brewing. Anyhow, he tells me that such great strides have been made in recent years in the area of dry yeasts that he now uses little (or nothing) else - and that goes for hops too, and they use just hop pellets.
I have the ingredients for my first two brews (hence my earlier question regarding liquid yeast) and they include liquid yeast and fresh hops.
Now I am sure there would be specialist brews where you would need (or want) to use specialist yeast and hops and that personal preferences play a huge part in all this, but my two questions would be:

A. Would you agree that for 'general brewing' (at least whilst trying to master AG brewing) one would do well to stick to dry yeast and hop pellets and

B. Since I have the mentioned ingredients, and my first brews will utilise the hop flowers (they have provided aroma, bittering and finishing hops) how should one use these to best avoid a clogged cooler? The brewquip guys talked about blitzing the hops in a food processor or coffee grinder for that purpose, or should I make up little cheescloth or muslin bags to pop into the kettle at the appropriate time?

I hope I have been concise enough and, again, I know personal experience and preference play a big part in these choices, but some practical guidence would be hugely appreciated.
Cheers,
Ian

[Kempicus]

I thought he was talking about a Kitchen hands pantyhose....guess not ;0)

[jt]

"stainless steel pot scrubber hose clipped "

That's a goldilocks or steelo or similar, that is hose clipped onto the back of the tap

[Ian]

Ah! Thank you jt Of course - that sounds brilliant in its simplicity and I'll do it.
Cheers

[denimglen]

Just remember to not get the pre-soaped ones or the straight steel ones, go stainless or copper scrubbies.

[Ian]

Dan, I guess if you put some hop cones in for filtering you obviously wouldn't use the blitzing technique because the ss scrubber you have clipped to the inside of your tap does all the filtering needed to stop clogging?

[Dan]

The SS scrubber lets break and hop pellet material through rather easily and can not always (but can) clog the scrubber resulting in a stuck runoff, the way I see it if there are some cones (flowers) (Whole hops) in the kettle they stick to the outside of the scrubber holding back most of the smaller material and not clogging.
As mentioned by denimglen above if you ever use this make sure they are stainless steel, I was fooled once by steel which looked like stainless and ended up with a rusted mess by boil end.

[Nick]

Yes liquids are a mine field. Yet they are absolutely essential if you want complexity. They add all sorts of flavours that you can't get through malt or hop schedules.

I stopped using dried early on in my brewing. I also moved from malt extract early on for the same reasons: quality and complexity.

Malted grains in the right produce a superior beer over extract.
Liquid yeast in the right hands produce a superior beer over dried IMHO.

[Ian]

Yup, 'Liquid yeast in the right hands' probably sums up where I am right now. Early days for AG so probably best avoided until I gain some more expertise in this area.

[Nick]

Have you considered trying an experiment?
Put down a pale ale with a recipe you know well.
Pitch a neutral (neutral meaning doesn't impart major flavours) liquid ale yeast into 1/2
Pitch your normal dried into the other half.

You will tell the difference immediately when you drink them.
I found I preferred the dried at first, maybe due to familiarity but gravitated to the liquid one.

[denimglen]

Meh, pitch a sachet of US-05 and a smackpack/vial of 1056/wlp001 and I would bet there would be little difference, if anything the US05 may be better due to better pitching rates.

[JoKing]

I agree with Denimglen.

[Stu McKinlay]

I've been involved in a test of this sort.

http://www.realbeer.co.nz/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7133&highlight=...