Dos Anyone Care about clear beer ?

[jstrausss]

I know taste is Number one Concern - of Cource , but For Me . To See a nice Clear Golden Color is Definatly Number 2 .

[paul84043]

I am kind of torn in this respect...I agree that a crystal clear beer is very nice to look at, but I also like the hefe style beers that are supposed to be cloudy.

The difficulty is, how do you get your beer clear? And is it worth the effort?
Also, when you filter, you are removing alot of the protien and the suspended solids that give your beer the good health effects and that added extra flavor.
My homebrews will typically clear out very well as they sit. They are by no means crystal clear, but clear enough to see the color very well through the glass. That's good enough for me.

If I were entering a competition and the definition of the beer required that it be clear, then it's another story. Otherwise, I won't bother.

[jstrausss]

So are you saying letting the beer sit for longer will Posibly help with clearing the beer alittle .

[paul84043]

Mine cleared out just in the time it took to condition, but...it could have something to do with the fact that I use a conical fermentor and don't re-suspend a bunch of stuff in the beer since I don't transfer, I keep the trub drained off as it's fermenting, and I bottle straight out of the primary fermentor. The first 4 or 5 beers have a little heavier sediment layer, but the rest have hardly any at all.

Some people say that you can chill them to clear them out as well, but I believe you have to chill them as cold as you can get, 0 degrees F is common in breweries.
And then...you run into chill haze which is another story entirely!

If you are concerned about clarity, I would look into the addatives that are specially designed for that purpose. Irish moss (or the concentrated active ingredient) added in the last 5 minutes is supposed to help with clarity, and there are a couple of addatives that will cure chill haze as well. These in combination with filtering will result in crystal clear beer, but the addatives alone will probably be good enough for us home brewers.

[Richard English]

Not all beers are meant to be clear. That beer needs to be clear and bright is a myth assiduously nurtured by the like of A-B who would have the customer believe that brightness is a substitute for taste.

Bottle conditioned beers, especially those like the UK's Hop Back Summer lightning or Australia's Cooper's Sparkling which throw a very heavy sediment, are not easy to pour clear unless the last few drops are wasted. In Australia is is common for Coopers drinkers to invert the bottle to make the glass cloudy and thus to show the world that they are drinking one of Australia's few decent beers!

Incidentally, one of the other myths is that beer should be golden. Beers can come in almost any colour from black to white - with blue being perhaps the only exception!

Of course, there's one easy solution to the problem - drink out of a pewter tankard!

[paul84043]

As usual, you are quite correct. I was just trying to throw out some ideas for someone that really likes and wants clear beer.

[Richard English]

Heaven forfend that I should be thought to be disagreeing with you! You, too, are quite right. I was simply looking at the clarity issue from an angle that others might not have considered.

[paul84043]

No problem at all, that's what makes this place so great, the different opinions you can get on one subject!!

I personally agree completely that clear beer is a selling point that the americanized mega breweries have pawned off on us, but I must admit it is a beautiful thing to be able to see the deep (or light!) clear colors, I really enjoy holding it up to the light to enjoy the differences in the beers. My wife thinks I'm insane.

I just don't know if it's enough of an issue for me to worry about it. If it happens that they come out clear, which is what has happened so far, then so be it! The black and Tan that I just bottled will not be clear, I can tell that already. I can also tell that it is going to taste great!

[yonkersbrewer]

One of the great things about homebrewing is the ability to produce beers that are not part of the clear tasteless mega brewery palatte. I think that the reason that my Porter gets the raves that it does is not because of its quality (good enough I am sure, but I am not fooling myself with only two years home brewing experience) but because it is dark and malty and tastes sweet in a way that is unlike what other clear beers taste like.

Clear is great if you are looking for styles that are like the mega stuff but why bother when there are so many styles that are unusual and clearly better than clear.

[YamahaXS]

Perhaps it is because 36 years of A-B advertisements have brainwash me, BUT I love looking at my beer, backlit and sexy like a beast, bubbling up with anticipations. err... wait. I was talking about my beer not me!


:D

Seriously, if you want a golden beer, stay with the lightest extracts and grains you can find. You will be missing that roasted flavor effect, but you can do some awesome bitters/ales with cystal malt.

[Tweek]

You can get a clear beer by using an inline filter. You would need to keg the beer in order to use the filter(unless there is one out there that I am unaware of) and you would also need to force carbonate the beer, which depending on your preference you may or may not want to do this ( Richard, I know, I know:D). You can then use a counter pressure filler to bottle if you want. The filter housing is not too expensive, but beware the cost of the filter. I would reccomend that you shop around for filters, including at hardware stores. The filters that go in the housing are the same filters, and housing for that matter, that are on some older houses for filtering water.

I have done this one time. It worked quite nicely the beer came out perfectly clear. Also I dont think you can do it if it is already carbonated or if you are going to carbonate naturally in the keg because most of the filters that you would want to use have such a tight tolerance that they would filter out any suspended yeast, adding more at the end would of course leave sediment, defeating the purpose.

Another way that works pretty well is conditioning it in a keg. If you are carefull not to move the keg, once it is done the first pint will usually take out 9/10ths of the sediment, leaving the rest of the beer very clean. This is the method that I prefer. The only time that I would consider hooking up that filter again is if I was making a light pils that I wanted crystal clear for novelty purposes.

Hope this helps


Cheers

[Richard English]

Quote "...Another way that works pretty well is conditioning it in a keg. If you are carefull not to move the keg, once it is done the first pint will usually take out 9/10ths of the sediment, leaving the rest of the beer very clean...."

This is, of course, the way it's done in pubs in the UK. One of the skills of the cellarman is to know exactly when the cask (not a keg, by the way) is ready for tapping and, as it empties, tilting.

Tapping can happen anything from a few hours to a few days after the cask arrives at the pub, depending on the type of beer and thus how quickly the yeast settles out.

As the beer continues to work it becomes slightly stronger and slightly less sweet until all the remaining sugars in the beer have been fermented out. Then the beer starts on its final stage and begins to turn into vinegar.

Real Ale is only drinkable between the time of initial clearing and the time when it starts to turn sour. That can be as little as a week (or less if the cellarman doesn't know his job or if the cellar conditions are not right). Since any unsold beer will represent a loss to the pub, it's very easy to see why the advent of chemical-fizz beers, with their ease of setup (just connect and squirt) and their long shelf life (almost unlimited since they are sterile) was welcomed by the sellers of beer - whose job it is, of course to make a profit. The fact that the stuff tasted like cold gnat's urine was seen to be unimportant, just so long as the drinking public could be conned into buying the muck!

Thank goodness (and CAMRA) that we in the UK managed to stop the nonsense and that now so many other countries are following the UK's lead.

The war's not over yet - believe it or believe it not, A-B Budweiser (sold in the UK at a premium price - can you imagine - a bottle of Bud costs more here than a bottle of Fuller's 1845!) is the best-selling bottled beer in the UK! So the great beer con is still alive and well, driven by the clever marketing and deep pockets of the chemical-fizz factories.

So keep it up, fellow boozers! Whether you brew it or buy it - make sure it's REAL!