Why you should trim away the excess material on your hop sack?

This is one step in our instructions that we really do not explain, we tell you to trim away and access material on your hopsack, but what is the reason for that?

If you have ever brewed one of our recipes and you're adding some hops or maybe one bag of grains you will notice that after you tie your hopsack you will have quite a lot of material left over. We always tell you to trim that material away.

One reason is that if you have a lot of extra material just laying around it could be susceptible to harboring an infection.

 If you are doing a hop boil for example and you leave the excess material kind of laying over the lip of the pot and it never gets into that full boil, then it could not be properly sanitized which could result in an infection.

Now the chances of this happening on very low but we always feel it is better to be safe than sorry.

Another reason we tell you to do that is to help during bottling.

If you have this long piece of cloth floating around your fermenter then when you go to bottle, you have a good chance of getting that cloth sucked into the spigot opening.

This can really put a damper on your bottling process.

So by cutting that excess material off you are reducing your risk for infection and remove the risk of headaches during the bottling process.

Cheers,

Robert