Use a hop back w/o hops

[disasterbrew]

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

Bump for possibilities? Tasty, you've used rice hulls in a hop back before. Do you pre-chill and/or rinse the hulls before using them as a filter?

[spiderwrangler]

If you've got chilled wort and are concerned about sanitization, you could likely bag the hulls and boil them to pasteurize, drain and rinse them with sterile water to remove any possible extracted tannins, then have sanitized hulls to use in the hopback.
Running hot wort through them would probably be fine at moderate temps, not sure about high temp, but you wouldn't have the same tannin extraction concerns you have when mashing as your pH and gravity would be stable throughout (not getting alkaline or getting below 1.010)

[TastyMcD]

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

Bump for possibilities? Tasty, you've used rice hulls in a hop back before. Do you pre-chill and/or rinse the hulls before using them as a filter?

No, I only sterilize them my letting them soak for 10 minutes at 200+ and I figure even if rice hulls were loaded with tannins (I doubt they have any at all) my 6-8 ounces couldn't produce enough to be noticed in the beer. My experience backs this up.
Tasty

[anday6]

Good enough for me.

[disasterbrew]

Perfect! Thanks guys.

[LukeD23]

Wow! I have seen this topic on the forum for the last week or so and finally opened it.

Great info here!

I have always thought about doing a hop back for the trub filter affect it gives, but the price of hops made me feel like it just wasn't worth the extra 1/2 gallon of beer id get. The rice hulls idea is brilliant! Once again Tasty you are giving great info to the homebrewing community. Thanks man!

[trwelt]

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?

did you ever try tasty's rice hulls in a bag trick? how did it turn out?

[disasterbrew]

Wow. Really late getting back to this one. Since I've posted this, I've used the rice hull trick about ten times. No bad effect that I or any of my brewing friends can tell, and it's a great trub filter.