I finally did a lighter beer with my new kettle a few weeks ago and I took some pics of the trub cone. This was a cream ale, so should be easier to see. Because of all the cold break, the picture doesn’t really show much, but there was actually a cone of hops and hot break in there, just not all that dramatic.
There’s about .75 - 1 gallon of wort left, and as you can see, it’s pretty full of trub. It’s a good bit of wort to leave behind, but if you want to keep cold break in the kettle, it’s challenging to get more out of the kettle. It’s really not that big of a deal though. There was only about 2 oz of hops and it was only chilled down to 70. When the weather finally gets cooler I’ll try some lagers and chill down to 40, which should produce more cold break.
Basically I chilled for 15 minutes or so with the IC, pulled it, then took a spoon and whirpooled it real well. Put the lid on and let it sit for 20 minutes or so. Then did a 1/2 valve turn drain to the fermenter. The wort in the fermenter seemed considerably clearer than the previous efforts, so the diverter plate seemed to kept a lot in the kettle.
The previous batch was a 1.043 dry stout and I guess there was less trub when I harvested the yeast. Kind of hard to really quantify that, but the slurry looked nice. After this beer came out of the fermenter, the harvested yeast still looked great. There is definitely less trub getting into the fermenter.
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This is a More Beer kettle. I thought about making one for a while for my keg kettle, and the more I thought about things, the more I realized I just wanted a standard kettle, so I bought a new one all welded up from More Beer. It's very nice and was pretty reasonable.
Basically it's piece of sheet stainless I think a couple inches high and spot welded to the bottom of the kettle. It's pretty simple and works well. Even if I don't worry about it and dump quickly, it still leaves a lot behind.