What's going on everybody and welcome back to another video. In today's video I'm going to do my best to answer a question I've been getting pretty consistently over the last several months in every single one of my brood day videos and that is how the hell have I been adding so many hops to my boil kettle, free outside of the hop spider, outside of a hop bag and not been clogging my pump, my chiller, any of that stuff transferring over and fermenting it with that and any issues. And I'm here to answer that question, hopefully with some clarity. I've actually been burning with the hop spider for many, many years from well before I actually started using the claw hammer supply system. It's been part of my standard brew kit for a very long time because it does help capture those hops. It helps make cleanup a lot easier. It keeps you from clogging stuff and overall it's just a very convenient piece of equipment. So why would I get rid of it, right? Well, the answer is because it actually negatively impacts hop utilization and in my recent experience significantly negatively impacts hop flavor. Starting with the re-brew of my German pilsner I made not too long ago, I just kind of wanted to see what would happen if I added the hops in freely. How would that impact flavor? How would that impact the experience? And it was an overwhelmingly positive impact. If you are restricting the hops, breaking down in the work and restricting them from floating around and recirculating, you're restricting not only their utilization of alpha acids, but also the extraction of hop oils as well. And that's where a lot of the flavor of hops that we all want comes from. There's a thing I see a lot about how using a hopspiter reduces your hop utilization by about 10%. And that's probably accurate. The other thing about that rule is too, I think it depends on how fine that steel mesh is. If you have a much more fine and tight mesh on that hopspiter, you're going to experience a lot less utilization. And if you had a coarser mesh on the hopspiter, that's pretty simple to understand. So that 10% rule should be taken with a grain of salt regardless. However, hop utilization does not include the impacts of hop flavor. And that's something that I think no one's really talking about. Hop utilization is pretty much purely about I.B. use. So when it comes down to it, ever since I ditched my hopspiter, I've really not been seeing any sort of change in bitterness, but I have certainly been experiencing a tremendously different hop flavor and a lot more complex hop flavors that are coming through because those oils are not as restricted. Now if you have a claw hammer system like myself and you're concerned about still clogging it, nothing wrong with that. I would recommend recirculating through the hopspiter and letting it overflow into the kettle. And maybe that would help a little bit in terms of getting those hop oils out. But then you're probably going to clog the bazooka screen, which isn't going to help too much. So I'm going to walk you through exactly what I've done, the changes that I've made into the system to help ensure this change works and to keep it from clogging. I've actually used up to five ounces of hops in a brew so far without clogging, but I have yet to really push that boundary, although I'm pretty confident it's not really going to result at any clogs. The method that I'm using has been around for a long time. It's not really a new technique for home brewers at all. However, I think it's something that's relatively new for those of us who use all in one systems and don't really think too much about this step. The first thing I did was I removed the hopspiter. The second thing I did was I removed the bazooka screen from the kettle out. The bazooka screen is always going to be the first thing to clog. It's a very tight mesh. It's very difficult for hop particles to pass through. That's the point of it, but you need to remove it in order for this method to work. The next thing I did is put a three-way valve on my pump out. So what this does is it allows me to bypass my chiller and go directly into a whirlpool arm, which is the fourth thing. The whirlpool arm I'm using is the spin cycle from brewhardware.com. This is something you can clip onto the side of your kettle, which makes it virtually universal for every single brew system out there. That's a big deal. Having that whirlpool arm is critical to what I'm about to explain. I have this recirculation path going from my kettle through my pump and back up into the whirlpool arm. The exit path of the whirlpool arm is tangential to the kettle so that allows me to get the maximum whirlpool effect. At the end of my boil, I will not chill. I will simply initiate a whirlpool. I'll turn my pump on and I'll set the three-way valve so it does not pass to the chiller then all that work goes up and it recirculates through the whirlpool arm. Your pump is so much less likely to get clogged than your plate chiller if that's what you're using. So don't worry about this method. I've never, ever had my pump clogged. I'll let that whirlpool happen for about three minutes. After three minutes of elapsed, I'll turn off the pump and allow it to start just naturally piling up. This is something called the T-leaf Paradox. There's some material out there on it. I highly recommend you look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about. It basically says that if you continually run your whirlpool, you're never going to get the tube or anything in solution to pile up in the center. But if you run it for a short period of time and then turn it off and let it sit, everything piles up into a nice tight, neat cone in the center of the kettle. It actually works perfectly every single time. So three minutes of pump on time and 15 minutes of rest time, you'll have a nice, clear work and a very neat cone of tube in the very center of your kettle, which allows you to draw from the side with no pickup of hops whatsoever. Once this step is done, I'll set my three wave out so I'm not recirculating but pushing towards the chiller instead. Then I can chill down and continue as usual. Every single time I've done this, I've had exceptionally clear work going into the fermenter with no chunks of any true bit at all. And it's pretty remarkable the difference that that is made. Now there are a few caveats to this method that I want to cover. And the first is that it actually does involve sitting at a high temperature for about 20 extra minutes. And this can theoretically lead to increased bitterness due to extended isomerization of alpha acids. Now after 60 minutes, it really doesn't seem like it's that much extra bitterness being created. And that's been my experience. However, mathematically, it does show that there is extra isomerization happening. So if you're concerned about that lower down, you're bitering additions accordingly. The second thing is that yes, you do need to find a different way to sanitize your chiller. If it is independent from the recirculation via that three wave valve, your chiller needs to either be sanitized using a boiling liquid going through it at the very beginning of the boil. And you can do that with a quick recommendation or using star sand pushing it through before you even begin brewing. The third thing is if you have an immersion chiller, then this is going to be a much easier technique because you don't even need to worry about the inclusion of your plate chiller in the first place, and you could just stick your immersion chiller in there after the whirlpool is complete to continue chilling. So I'm going to pop up a diagram of my valve structure right now. I actually have two three wave valves. The first is on the pump out and the second is on the chiller out. This is just set up this way so I have the ability to both chill and recirculate at the same time because during the summer, my water is a little bit warm and it's not always easy for me to immediately chill in one pass. I found though that even though I may restart the whirlpool during that recirculation during the chill, it doesn't actually affect the trip cone once it's been set, which is nice. This method allows me to first move from the kettle to the pump back to the recirculation arm for that whirlpool. Then secondly, after that trube cone is set, it allows me to start the chill while still recirculating. And then lastly, it allows me to shut off the recirculation while still chilling and then move to the fermenter. It's actually a very nice setup and allows me to do everything without disconnecting any hoses, which is really quite nice. I just have to disconnect the one hose from the recirculation arm and just move that to the fermenter and we're good to go. Now if you're still concerned about clogging after this, that is completely understandable. Every system is a little different and also every pump and plate chillers is also a little different. So sometimes folks are going to have clogs where I may not. And so if you're still concerned about that, I would recommend maybe just consider using free hops only at the very end of your boil. Maybe in the last 20 or 30 minutes of the boil, instead of throughout the first 60 minutes or first word hops. Maybe use those in a hop spider, considering that it doesn't really seem to impact a bitterness all that much, at least in my experience, and then free the hops later for flavor and aroma additions. Secondly, you can also consider using hop bags that float in the wort that will help collect all that hop material as well. So that's another method, but consider that that also does have similar effects to the hop spider, although I don't think it's as pronounced. So I hope that answered some questions you guys have had over what I'm doing, but I'm just dumping hops freely into the kettle. And I hope that alleviates any concerns you might have. And most importantly, I hope that inspires you to try it out yourself. It does make a significant difference, and it has been very positive for me. So I recommend trying it out yourself if you haven't already. 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