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After the wort is chilled and ready to rack to the fermenter, I run into a problem. When pouring wort into the strainer in the funnel, a ton of hop gunk gets stuck. Then I need to scrape and repeat many times. All that time, the wort is exposed.
Is the answer to use a hop bag so the transfer is faster?
Pretty much. Either the strainer will strain the hop material, and clog, as you say, or you can use hop bags or a hop spider to do the filtering.
Other methods involve whirlpooling in the kettle to let hop material settle in a cone in the middle of the kettle, then transferring from the side of the kettle, outside of the cone.
I usually use a siphon. My experience is that it doesn't get clogged by hop material easily unless it is whole cone.
Best way is to use an autosiphon but hold it above the hop matter at the bottom. You can also put a mesh bag over the end to keep out hop matter.
I will say that in my hoppy beers, I actually keep all the hop matter in there on purpose.
I like to use an auto siphon just over the bottom of the pot, as long as you don't move it around too much you shouldn't transfer much. The little bit you to transfer can be left behind again by transferring again to a secondary fermentor. From there, if you transfer into a bottling bucket, you should abandon all of it prior to bottling.
