Pliny clone starting its 3rd week in primary, so planning my next step...

Getting ready to kick my first keg of the Lakefront Fixed Gear clone, so I'll soon have an empty keg to fill. Anyway, only at the verrryyyy end of this week did my Pliny start to settle down. There is still a burp or two from the airlock for this beer, a random bubble coming up from the yeast cake on the bottom, and the beer is still very cloudy and smells a bit "sweet" from the airlock.

This beer could turn out wrong because of some missteps on brew day. However...

Things I have advanced in/built onto/random thoughts:

1. I have a second temp controller now in addition to my Johnson. I will have a third built today or tomorrow.
2. Now that I have a temp controller for fermentation, I went and bought a thermowell. Because my temps are controlled right now with ordinary house temps, I don't need to enlist a heating or cooling element with the temp controller: it's just monitoring right now.
3. I've written in at least two posts about the hop spider. What a God-send for filtering in the kettle and not having to try and filter all that hop trub when racking to the fermentor!
4. This will be another beer that needs dry hopping (2, in fact). For the Lakefront clone I used this but I think I'll use a BSG hop filter bag. It might even be used to filter when racking to the secondary. I'm looking at one of these for filtering when racking, but I don't have an idea on which micron rating to get yet.
5. I want to rack to a secondary for the dry hopping. Planning on a good purge of CO2 for my secondary vessel (I don't know how long for that), then rack, the purge again.
6. One of my problems on brew day was getting the wort chilled down enough. By measuring the temp of the tap water I found it was actually somewhat warm. I had the idea to use those frozen blocks of gel or whatever they are when the wort chiller had reached its maximum potential. I know I could use a second chiller in an ice bath but am mulling over this option before I go out and plop down more money. Should work.
7. If I keg this beer (I may bottle), I will have one of the aforementioned micron filter bags. What is a good guess for the micron rating? I don't want it to be so tiny that yeast will be filtered out (or do I?). I'm trying to avoid using gelatin or something like that for cold crashing. I've never done cold crashing (on purpose) or any finings post-fermentation.

Ugh. I want this beer to turn out better than all the others before. Previously I didn't care about beer clarity that much, so I REALLY want to hone in on that this time. Filtering seems to be my method instead of using finings and then siphoning off the trub in the keg after cold crashing, but you guys spill your thoughts and see how sane I am. I want to really use some 'new' techniques here.

Can I get a few "Likes"?

 

Doing NB's Plinian Legacy. Check out the pdf on the Additional Information tab.

 

So you have the 1/4hp model? What is the flow like?

 

That's a surprise. Having never tasted Pliny I don't know what it's supposed to taste like. Hop-fully I'll be able to get ahold of a bottle one day without having to travel to CA.

 

Success! I've had three 16oz glasses already . I'm very satisfied with how this has turned out. I don't know what a real-deal Pliny tastes like, but I don't care. This one is so good, I don't care if it's a real match. I have one small issue to work out: if I'm dry hopping in a hop bag in the keg, the hop bag swells to a point where it is larger than the keg opening, causing me to have delays in getting the bag out. I see any delay as a bad thing that might cause potential oxygen contamination. The beer is still cloudy, which I ultimately don't care about, but the first few 8oz pours yielded some solid yeast bits that were actually 'sandy' under the tongue. They've disappeared after these first glasses. To have something work out after weeks of waiting is immensely satisfying. Thanks for all of the input you guys. I do appreciate it.