Heriot-Watt Brewing and Distilling course

DocAnna said:

Not to overuse kettle finings as too much can make hazes worse.

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Oooo thank you. I have to say I am a bit heavy handed in this depth, and would not that connected the two. Thankyou!

Go on there is room for a centrifuge beside the brew fridge - next to the flash pasturizer.

Smug or what I learnt that ages ago and sometimes only put in 1/3rd of a Protofloc.
Probably only thing I have got right.
Stick in there Anna

Do you mean 1/3 of a tablet?

I get jelly babies, but I thought that was the only issue with too much Irish moss (which I believe is the same thing).

A bit of rude Internet maths has reduced my normal 5g to 1.5g

Yes MashBag I use 1/3rd of a tablet, I have weighed a tablet and they are approx 25g so 8g approx 1/3rd is enough.
I used to throw in a full tablet years ago and it looked like cotton wool soup and that much of it I would lose some volume with the cotton settling that high up.

I don't have tablets. I have had to guess it. I have cml fine ground loose... And boil starts in 10 minutes (really)

Happy Brewday

The Baron said:

Happy Brewday

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"brewday" sooo yesterday Pretty much done now.

DocAnna said:

really can't see myself installing a sheet filter frame or a centrifuge!

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though a centrifuge might be a tad ambitious, a frame sheet filter is not too out there for home brewers:-

https://www.morebeer.com/products/beer-plate-filter-kit.html

I've used a mesh filter on my unititank but do get losses as the design of the filters is not great and as they block they restrict the flow and you get a good few litres of losses. Focussing now on better 'dumping of trub and hops' and better cold crash.

Until recently have always used protofloc in all beers including hazy's but recently stopped using them for Hazy's but not yet noticed any difference. Maybe I was under-dosing.

Interesting on centrifuges though. I've read that you shouldn't attempt to filter in any way hazy's as it impacts haze, but breweries famous for their hazy's, like Verdant for example, utilise centrifuges, which as far as I'm aware are the grand daddy of filtration methods and the most efficient at filtering and minimising or even avoiding losses, so seems to me filtering shouldn't 'remove' or impact haziness?

Insights on this course are fascinating...

Why do you filter @hoppyscotty?
I understand why commercial brewers do so and, having done a Beer Finishing and Packaging module as part an MSc in Brewing Science, I’m with @DocAnna, I have difficulty seeing that the faff/risk of beer filtration is worthwhile for the home brewer. A fined beer usually drops pretty clear with a little patience. I know of at one brewery that successfully produces keg beer without filtration or pasteurisation.

I have to admit I've got an eye on producing beer commercially at some point in the future...its effectively my retirement plan...not that I'm particularly close to retiring, but at that stage in life where I'm starting to look towards it, so I do my homebrew as if I'm producing beer commercially with an eye on costs and efficiency and all those usual commercial factors to try to learn ahead of making the switch. One major area of losses is losses to trub and dry hops in the fermenter and I was looking to filtering as a way to try to extract more beer out of the trub rather than dumping the trub which is very wasteful, but it seems that 'mechanical' filtering methods are not good at that I guess thats why the bigger breweries invest alot in centrifuges...its the bags vs Dyson thing.

But you're right...it is a big faff, but I'm a serial faffer and so far its hit and miss if its beneficial at all in terms of reducing losses, in fact sometimes it can be detrimental. At the moment out of a 70 litre batch I'm losing about 10 or so litres to trub and hops, more when I do a big DDH DIPA, so looking at ways to reduce losses and get better hop utilisation in the fermenter to reduce hop costs.

hoppyscotty said:

Interesting on centrifuges though. I've read that you shouldn't attempt to filter in any way hazy's as it impacts haze, but breweries famous for their hazy's, like Verdant for example, utilise centrifuges, which as far as I'm aware are the grand daddy of filtration methods

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Well centrifugation isn't a filtration method....

And you have to distinguish between "good" haze which is fine and resistant to methods like centrifugation, and "bad" haze from flour and yeast and god knows what other coarse ...err "crud".

Northern_Brewer said:

Well centrifugation isn't a filtration method....

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Scientifically you are correct. But it seems that in brewing parlance, "filtration" means "removing particulates", which includes both fining and centrifuging.

well centrifuge separates solids from liquids, which is what I'm trying to achieve, separating the trub and hops from the beer to recover more beer. The fine metal mesh filters are too course to filter out haze so hazy beers remain hazy...but I guess the big commercial plate filters will filter out haze too.

hoppyscotty said:

One major area of losses is losses to trub and dry hops in the fermenter and I was looking to filtering as a way to try to extract more beer out of the trub

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Yeah but at what cost the filter and the plates.

Been there, done that, (for wine) sold it.

@hoppyscotty - a few thoughts.

To recover wort from kettle hops and trub or beer from dry hops, and cold break/yeast ex fermenter, big breweries often use a centrifuge or a mechanical filter which are very effective but have high capital costs. These apply mechanical force to separate the liquid from the solid material. When carried out on hot wort (above, say 80C) sanitation is not a big issue although hot side oxidation may be. When performed on beer, after fermentation there are risks of both oxidation and infection. Carrying out separation in anaerobic, aseptic conditions is a possible solution as is re-heating then re-cooling recovered beer before blending back into the finished product stream prior to packaging. The big question tor a home or small commercial brewer is whether the solution is worse than the problem.

On the subject of undesired beer haze, a usual approach is to reduce to a minimum one or both of the types of molecule that combine to form haze before considering filtration. Filtration can be regulated e.g. by pore size or grade of filter aid to remove particles above a certain size (e.g. yeast cells) whilst allowing through particles that cause haze, if desired. Having said that, for a hazy beer there seems no need to filter the whole product stream, just the solids to recover entrained wort or beer.

At a home brew level, I wonder whether a juice extractor might be adapted to extract beer from your dry hops or (subject to sorting food hygiene issues) a spin-dryer or a washing machine on spin cycle in each case with an appropriate filter cloth to line the drum. It would be interesting to know how much you could recover using existing domestic technology. Happy faffing! Let us know how you get on.

I’m cooking tea at the mo’ (Parmesan and parsley crust chicken thighs with crushed roast tatties and some veg) there’s some bits of this conversation it’s worth revisiting- though the short version is centrifuges aren’t a replacement for filters, and @Wynne has already answered most of the queries. Except that under no circumstances is recovering beer from trub a good idea at home brew of craft brewery scale. For that you need a sealed decanter centrifuge - which is a wholly different thing.

Well my attempts at filtering trub - and I don't mean filtering the whole trub volume, but running the dip tube right down to the trub level such that you start sucking off the less dense trub before you get to the really thick stuff, has not worked really so I've given that up. Clearly the very fine stainless steel mesh filter I use is not fine enough and as you say moving to finer paper filters just introduces more cost and probably not a good idea anyway. Just have to live with the trub losses.

hoppyscotty said:

Well my attempts at filtering trub - and I don't mean filtering the whole trub volume, but running the dip tube right down to the trub level such that you start sucking off the less dense trub before you get to the really thick stuff, has not worked really so I've given that up. Clearly the very fine stainless steel mesh filter I use is not fine enough and as you say moving to finer paper filters just introduces more cost and probably not a good idea anyway. Just have to live with the trub losses.

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Run the wort into the fermenter before the trub starts to be introduced, pour the trub from the kettle into a jug, place the jug into the fridge.
After a few hours pour off the clear wort from the jug and pour the trub away, heat up the wort to about 90C and bottle or cool it and add to fermenter. Does wonders for the BH efficiency, I got an extra 2 litres off my last batch.
As for dry hopping, I just do a hop stand now.
These two will be going into a starter when I harvest some more Coopers yeast

@hoppyscotty - another possibility, if you are looking to reduce cost, is the re-use of dry hopping hops as bittering hops in a following batch. I have not tried it myself but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work provided you can adjust your recipe for using wet hops and you are happy to use your dry hop variety for bittering bittering. By using wet hops, you would also also be reducing wort losses compared with rehydrating dry hops in the boil. More faffing!

hoppyscotty said:

But you're right...it is a big faff, but I'm a serial faffer and so far its hit and miss if its beneficial at all in terms of reducing losses, in fact sometimes it can be detrimental. At the moment out of a 70 litre batch I'm losing about 10 or so litres to trub and hops, more when I do a big DDH DIPA, so looking at ways to reduce losses and get better hop utilisation in the fermenter to reduce hop costs.

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That does seem a lot to lose, presumably your using pellets? What dosage?