POUR ME: When I first started brewing I used to just pour chilled wort straight from the brew pot into the fermenter. I've learned that's not the best practice.

I was reading a thread on the great homebrewing resource homebrewtalk.com today, and I had a realization. Since switching to the all-grain method of brewing, I unconsciously changed the way I get the recently boiled and chilled yet still unfermented beer (technically called “wort” at this stage) from the boil kettle to my bucket for fermenting. It was a change for the better and it’s a change that you don’t need to go “all-grain” to make. In other words, extract brewers can benefit from this as well, creating better tasting beer and avoiding a mess on brew day.

For my first several batches (all were extract with some steeping grains) I would transfer my wort from the boil pot to my plastic fermenter in one of two ways: 1) Pour the contents of the boil pot through a plastic funnel that had a strainer inserted; or 2) Simply pour the entire contents straight from the pot to the bucket, with nothing between.

The problem with both of these options is there is a lot of stuff in your boil pot that you don’t necessarily want in your fermenter. Assuming you go about things properly—a vigorous boil and a quick chill-down—there should be a lot of proteins that have precipitated out of solution during both the heating up and cooling down processes. Plus you’ve got debris left over from whatever hops you used to add bittering, flavor and aroma to the beer during the boil.

When I used the funnel and filter method, all of these solids from the bottom of the pot—the solids are technically called “trub” (and pronounced “troob”)—clogged the filter in no time. I had backed-up wort spilling on the floor, hops overflowing the funnel; you get the idea. And when I opted for the straight pour method, all of that trub went into my fermenter with the liquid. While having some trub in your fermenter is not a huge problem, expert John Palmer tells us in How to Brew that it can lead to off-flavors, especially in lighter flavored beers like Pilsners, and it can create a cosmetic issue with chill haze—a condition where your finished beer will look foggy when stored or served at cold temperatures.

When I switched to my all-grain setup, which included a new boil kettle among other equipment upgrades, I then had a valve low on my kettle that allowed me to drain out the wort that way. No more pouring! This drain valve is connected to an angled tube called a dip tube on the inside of the kettle; it allows the valve to still suck up and export liquid when the liquid level gets lower than the hole for the valve. Don’t have a valve on your brew pot? You can do essentially the same thing with a siphoning tool called a racking cane—or better yet, an Auto Siphon.

I had backed-up wort spilling on the floor, hops overflowing the funnel; you get the idea.

So theoretically, using a valve with a dip tube or by siphoning, you can get almost all of the liquid from the pot without pouring. But there’s still the issue of the trub.

Here is where the art of whirlpooling comes in. If you tour a commercial brewery, you’ll likely see a vessel called the whirlpool tank. It’s the last stop before the wort leaves the “brewhouse” (all the equipment used to turn the ingredients into wort) and heads to a fermenter where it will become beer with the help of yeast. As you would suspect, this whirlpool vessel uses centrifugal force to create a whirlpool of wort. Thanks to whirlpool physics, when the liquid stops spinning, the majority of the sediment will have gathered in the center of the tank floor. Clean wort can be drained off from the side of the tank, leaving the sediment behind.

By getting a good whirlpool going in your brew pot during or after the chill-down process, you can likewise siphon clear wort from the sediment-free areas after about 10 or 15 minutes. Of course, you’ll need to be extra careful not to disturb the brew pot or the wort inside it too much while making the transfer to the fermenter, or you’ll redistribute the sediment pile and have to start the whirlpool over again.

Alternately, a large colander could work to hold back the trub and hop debris as you transfer your wort. The key here is finding a strainer with holes small enough to restrict the solids but large enough to keep liquid from backing up and splashing the polite friend—or worse yet, spouse—you coerced into holding the colander as you poured. I say go with the whirlpool.

Related posts:

1. Blichmann BoilerMaker Follow-Up
2. Breaking the All-Grain Barrier: Burner & Boil Kettle
3. Brew Log, Aug. 7, 2010: Brewed C’z IPA