Weighing down hop bag

Bigtoe107

I've been brewing using kits for a while now and yesterday I decided to add about 40g of cascade to my partially fermented coopers Ipa; I put them in a bag as I didn't realise they would be so buoyant. Has anybody any tips on how I can weigh down the bag to get all the flavour without risking infection?

On a side note I just got a 28L stainless boiler and am looking to move on to extract brewing. I bought the hbc extract Irish stout kit and 3kg of light Lme but ideally I would like to buy my own grain and hops so with that in mind tips on where I should start and how to find/make recipes would be great. I downloaded brewtarget but it all seems like mumbo-jumbo to me :P

Shiny

Do you have any glass marbles lying around? You could sanitise a few of those and that would weigh it down for you.

Bigtoe107

No I have no marbles lying about, a small glass maybe? but that might be too big.

Shiny

Yeah a glass would work if you can fit it. Or cutlery, stainless steel bolts or ball bearings. Even a smooth rock would do. I have never bothered weighing my own down but that is laziness more than anything.

Bigtoe107

Grand so anything non-porous can be used? Do you think I would be ok to weight it down now, as in take the bag out of the fermenter and add the sanitised weight or would that be likely to lead to infection?

mayto

I just turn the hop bag over after a few days with a sanitised spoon. I would not take the hop bag out at this stage to add weight.

Bigtoe107

Went ahead and weighed it down with two sanitised spoons and a bolt :P Be sick now if it gets infected because it smelled unreal!

Bigtoe107

mayto wrote: »

I just turn the hop bag over after a few days with a sanitised spoon. I would not take the hop bag out at this stage to add weight.

Well balls anyway only saw your post now after doing it, ahh well nothing I can do now

mayto

Bigtoe107 wrote: »

Well balls anyway only saw your post now after doing it, ahh well nothing I can do now

It will be fine , just saying I would not go to the hastle of taking hops out to add weights. I actually added 40g of cascade to my nugget and cascade pale ale and it smells n tastes unreal, pretty similar to sierra nevada. I was about to bottle it there but realised I left my starsan at another brewers place bottling will have to wait until tomorrow.

Bigtoe107

Love Sierra Nevada in fact torpedo is probably my favourite beer, is that an all grain batch your doing? I bought this 28L boiler to move onto extract so I would love my first one to be some sort of super hoppy APA

sharingan

Bigtoe107 wrote: »

Grand so anything non-porous can be used? Do you think I would be ok to weight it down now, as in take the bag out of the fermenter and add the sanitised weight or would that be likely to lead to infection?

Dont worry too much about infection. This isn't a dettox ad.

Fish out the bag and put a sanitised weight into it. If you put it into the kettle and boil it that is sufficient.

Try not to stir or disturb the brew much.

Seaneh

I don't weigh mine down as I have this weird idea in my head that sitting on the bottom is just as useless as sitting on the top.

I suspend mine... I tie a bit of string to a little ceramic bolt on one end and my bag on the other end and let the bag kind of float around the middle of the bucket.... In my head this means it will work better... No idea if this is the reality...

Bigtoe107

I'd imagine its all the one as long as the hops are submerged but I dunno you could be onto something :pac:

irish_goat

I have a small theory that having them near the bottom is better as during fermentation the CO2 created will drive the hop aroma out of the beer. If the bag is at the top then the CO2 will hit the hops and drive the aroma straight out of the bucket. If the bag is at the bottom, in theory, the hops should come into contact with less CO2 and any aroma that does get picked will be driven through the entire fermentor and so hopefully have more of an effect.

All just my owns musings though...