Use a hop back w/o hops

[disasterbrew]

Has anyone put a sanitized filtering material like empty nylon mesh hop sacks in their hop back as a pre-plate chiller filter? I got a Blichmann hop rocket for Christmas, and want to be able to use it with or without hops to keep my new plate chiller clean. Any ideas?

[Bokonon]

I haven't built my hop back yet, but I was thinking that either stainless ball bearings or glass beads would form a nice filter bed.

Another idea is a stainless steel sponge, can't remember the brand name off hand

[TastyMcD]

I use rice hulls in a hopsack in a lot of beers. Works great.
Tasty

[disasterbrew]

Thanks gentlemen. I'll give the rice hulls a try. Cool idea.

[disasterbrew]

I use rice hulls in a hopsack in a lot of beers. Works great.
Tasty

Do you soak or rinse the hulls before putting them in the hop rocket? How much do you use? Wondering about sanitation since I've never used rice hulls before.

[anday6]

It's a good idea to rinse them with WARM water. You don't want to go too hot and start extracting tannins from the husks. You will probably be okay if you are running the wort through between 140 and 170degF.

I say this knowing I rinse them before mashing but I don't know what hot, pre-chilled, wort will do to them. Anybody have some specific info for this?

[disasterbrew]

What if I want to use the plate chiller w/o pre chilling my wort down to 140?

[PSUHomebrewer]

I was wondering the same thing, probably getting the chiller at the end of the month. I was going to have a fab shop build a filter house but the owner, a fellow homebrewer and club member said he couldn't build it for what blichmann sells it for. One idea we came up with though is maybe making a ss cone/dome to place where the hops would go from ss screen. The project hasn't gone anywhere yet, but post what you finally decided to do and how it works.