The New and Improved Homemade Bazooka Tube

Ok, so here's another $12 modification I did. I bought the bazooka tube last week and put it to the test. It worked well, but could be even better so I set out on a mission. I did some perusing on the homebrewtalk and looked at variations of homemade bazooka tubes. Quickly, I jumped on McMaster Carr's industrial needs website and ordered 1 stainless steel hose clamp and a 30x30x.0056 stainless steel mesh screen, delivered for $12.

I did this because the purchased bazooka screen is straight and my drain port is about 3 inches above from the bottom of the kettle, therefore when I brewed the orange pale ale and tested out the new mods I had to tilt the keg when trasnferring into my fermenter for the last 3 gallons. It's no big deal really, but I like automation, hence the overkill homebrew rig. This new mod would allow my to use my 90 degree siphon tube and suck up all wort, literally all wort. I did a test tonight and took pictures, because sometimes pictures are better than words.



Luckily, trash day isn't until tomorrow, so I still had my lawn can (yes, Bristol township collects lawn debris weekly and they have a trash can dedicated to it) filled with spent grains and a pile of 6 ounces of hops on top. Yeah, i consider it lawn debris and they don't seem to mind either as they do collect it from me. Needless to say, I scooped out the 6 ounces of hops and even a few scoops of whole grains and put them in my boil kettle with 5 gallons of water. I heated up the kettle for about 10 minutes until the hops infused with the water.



The test here assumes that my hopbag didn't exist and I only relied on my homemade bazooka screen. Albeit, I will be using both on future brews for added comfort and convenience of chilling and recirculating the wort. FYI, 6 ounces is a lot of hop additions for one brew (hence the pale ale I was making).



Check out the pics of the homemade bazooka screen in action.



Here is a pic from a side view. You can see the 90 degree elbow siphon tube.

After installing the bazooka screen, I boiled 5 gallons of hop water. I funneled it out and this is what you see; hoppy green water.


Then I let it funnel through the super fine funnel mesh and this was all the hops that got through. You'll never collect all of these tiny hop particles, but this is impressive. Here is the funnel with about 1 tablespoon of hop particles in 5 gallons passing.

Obviously, everything that was trapped by the bazooka tube is left behind, as it is supposed to be. Here is the boil kettle filled with hop sludge and grain, amongst the bazooka screen.

Here is the bazooka screen after doing it's job. Some particles were on the inside of the screen as some did pass through. As you can see from above, only .01% of the hop sludge made its way through.

As you can see here. I siphoned everything out except for the sludge and tilted the keg on it's side to show that about 2 cups of wort are remaining. I could fight for those last 2 cups, but I'd rather account for it in Beersmith (brewing software) and calculate my batch size for .25 gallons lost to sludge. Gotta love brewing software.

That's it for today folks. Now I just need your help in deciding what to brew next in order to put the hopbag and homemade bazooka screen to the test.

Cheers!