Interesting evening. The substantial hop content had settled out nicely after a couple of days of cold-crashing, coming to rest on top of the almost closed butterfly valve, with the bulk of the dead yeast already in the collection jar and the remainder settled on the Fermzilla’s sloping sides. Would have been nice to get the hops on the sides and all the yeast in the bottom, but I guess you can’t have everything.

With all this solid matter settled so nicely I didn’t want to risk disturbing it by moving the FV onto my workbench, so I decided to transfer to get straight from the fermentation fridge, using CO2 to push the beer into the keg at 10 PSI with 2 PSI differential between spunding valve and regulator. At one stage I felt guilty about using the increasingly expensive gas so wastefully and switched over to closed transfer, but by then it was 22:00 and I didn’t have time for the slow rate of flow that resulted from such a small elevation difference, so I switched back to gas.

All went well until the floating dip tube touched the settled matter just below the 5 litre mark, at which point all flow ceased, and repeated clearing of the dip tube using gas failed to alleviate the problem. Later during cleaning I found a substantial wad of hops in the liquid transfer tube itself, so it looks as though this time it wasn’t the disconnect on the FV that was to blame, but regardless, I need to get into the habit of fitting a filter to the dip tube and another in the transfer tube, even if it means sanitising and purging more bits of plastic void.

In the end I gave up on the various blockages, deciding to cut my losses at 18 litres instead of squeezing out another two pints and risk oxygenating the whole keg. I knew it would be a lossy, hoppy monster and never anticipated using an overflow mini keg or even a bottle, but 3 litres of fermenter loss is quite a poor way to finish. Therefore:

#wisdom: use filters when transferring to keg. Use them. Filters.