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  • Filtration Advice for a Startup brewery

    I am in the early stages of starting a packaging brewery in Jacksonville, Florida.
    I have worked with plate, crossflow and cartridge filters in the past(worked in the wine industry for 6 years) but never DE filters.

    Is using a DE filter the only option for packaged beer? (cans and bottles)
    or is there a way to mimic DE filtration with pads? I have worked with fining in the past as a pre-filtration aid but only in wine.

    We are starting with with a 15bbl brewhouse with 30bbl fermenters.

    Cheers,

    Ben Davis
    Intuition Ale Works
    Ben Davis
    Intuition Ale Works
    Jacksonville Florida
    www.intuitionaleworks.com

  • #2
    It really depends on the load you are removing from the beer. How much time at what temp can you aford to let the beer sit at?
    Joel Halbleib
    Partner / Zymurgist
    Hive and Barrel Meadery
    6302 Old La Grange Rd
    Crestwood, KY
    www.hiveandbarrel.com

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    • #3
      Originally posted by IAW
      I am in the early stages of starting a packaging brewery in Jacksonville, Florida.
      I have worked with plate, crossflow and cartridge filters in the past(worked in the wine industry for 6 years) but never DE filters.

      Is using a DE filter the only option for packaged beer? (cans and bottles)
      or is there a way to mimic DE filtration with pads? I have worked with fining in the past as a pre-filtration aid but only in wine.

      We are starting with with a 15bbl brewhouse with 30bbl fermenters.

      Cheers,

      Ben Davis
      Intuition Ale Works
      Hi Ben,
      We are a 10bbl production brewery. We bottle most of our beers and filter using only a 40x40 plate and frame, K300 pads. Beer comes out bright and clear. You may need to think about how much "abuse" you will allow your bottled product to take; sitting on a warm store floor, etc.
      Prost
      dave
      Glacier Brewing Company
      406-883-2595
      info@glacierbrewing.com

      "who said what now?"

      Comment


      • #4
        2 cents on DE filtration

        Hi Ben-

        I'll also echo the good gentleman from Glacier Brewing, you need to figure out how shelf stable you want your beer to be. I've had fantastic beers that were wholly unfiltered which used only super flocculent yeast, but they're not terribly shelf stable. And I've had great beers that were filtered only with sheet filtration. I believe Coors is solely filtered (cold filtered and frost brewed, don't forget) by sheet filtration.

        My filtration experience with DE is that it's great for filtering any level of flocculent/non flocculent yeast (short of sucking a yeast cake), and I haven't experienced much flavor stripping that some brewers count as a downside to DE. Prior to my experience with the DE filter, the brewery I was working at had a secondary polishing filter called a Handtman which had coffee filter cone-shaped DE coated pads that captured any blowby from the DE filter. I am not sure it's any better than a typical plate and frame, which is what they eventually replaced the handtman with.

        In your winemaking experience, what kind of cell load were you filtering out of your wines? It seems to me that if your experience on the wine side was good with certain technologies, it should hold up for filtering beer if it's in the same ball park of cell load and other turbidity (like hops, trub, etc). The DE filter I used was a Della Toffola 15 sq meter and I believe it was originally manufactured for wine filtration. I suppose you know that whatever filtration media you use, you need to make sure it can handle filtration under pressure-- I'm sure there's been many a good filter ruined by that little piece of oversight.

        Out of curiosity, how did the crossflow filtration work out in your application? I've been intrigued by it ever since probrewer mentioned it in the filtration section on the main page, and would be interested in seeing if it could work for a small brewery. Were y'all using it as a primary filter to remove the yeast at some point during the fermentation? I'm not horribly knowledgeable about how wine is made, so forgive me if that's a silly question. Probably a better question would be, exactly how were you using it?

        It seems to me that similar to a centrifuge, one could net a significant amount of beer (or wine) that otherwise would go down the drain or on to water treatment when dropping yeast by employing use of a crossflow filter. Does this seem like sound logic to you or anyone else out there reading this?
        Sorry, hope I didn't thread-jack, it just seemed like an appropriate place to ask the question.

        Good luck with the selection of filtration media- there's a bit of voodoo science involved with DE but it can be pretty interesting when you get right down to it.

        Salud!
        Adam

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