Accounting for Hotside Loss

The SVBS is designed to be a small footprint and easy-to-use “all-in-one” brewing system. A major component of this concept was building it with an integrated pump and manifold system that eliminated the need to transfer hose connections, configure pumps, and mess around with unsanitary valves. However, brew kettles often are filled with lots of hop material and proteins, aka, trub. Trub can sometimes cause a pump or tubing to clog which can often bring your brew day to a screeching halt and result in a lot of tedious troubleshooting to resolve. To help protect the pump and manifold system on the SVBS, a Pump Filter is included. This Pump Filter sits at the bottom of the SVBS’s kettle and helps prevent trub from being pulled into the pickup port at the bottom of the kettle.

This filter is very effective at keeping large amounts of trub or hop debris from entering the pump and manifold system. Because of this, you may need to account for additional kettle loss when designing your equipment profile in brewing software like BrewFather or BeerSmith. Let’s take a quick look at a few variables that can affect this.

Malt Types and Grain Crush
Using malts with higher protein counts or crushing too fine with your mill may result in excess trub material which can increase losses in the kettle.

Hop Volumes
Using more hops results in more organic matter that rests at the base of the kettle. For recipes with larger hop bills, we recommend using a hop spider or mesh bag to help contain hops and maximize the volume of wort you can drain out of the kettle.

Kettle Finings and Chilling Method
Using a kettle fining such as irish moss, carrageenan, and products like WhirlFloc can significantly increase the amount of hot break. This is typically a favorable thing as it helps to create clearer wort that can be transferred to the fermenter but it may result in more volume being left behind in the kettle.

The chilling method can also play a small factor when filtering trub from wort. At cooler temps, hop oils and resins are more viscous which can contribute to less flow through the filter media.