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Any Reason Dark Beers Would Filter Differently Than Pale Beers?

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  • Any Reason Dark Beers Would Filter Differently Than Pale Beers?

    Hey y'all,

    Is there any reason a darker beer would be more difficult to filter than a pale beer? We're having some serious difficulty filtering our Schwarzbier with our DE leaf filter, and we're at a loss in determining the cause.

    We're primarily a lager brewery, and we filter just about everything, except the occasional ale (which we clear with finings). We use the same lager strain for all of our other lagers (German bock lager), and all of our lagers are 100% malt beers. Our other lagers filter fairly easily after 10-14 days of lagering. But the Schwarzbier blinds the filter almost immediately unless we give it more like 14-17 days of lagering time. Maybe we're just not lagering long enough, but like I said, we're not having any issues with our other lagers with our current lagering schedule.

    We filter with Perlite 23S or 27M, depending on the level of clarity. For the Schwarzbier, we use Perlite 23S. Our batch size is usually 60bbls and we have a 3m^2 Velo DE filter. Anyone have any suggestions or insights? I'd be happy to provide additional information regarding our fermentation or filtering process if it's helpful.

    Cheers,
    Matt
    Last edited by Matt@Bauhaus; 08-24-2016, 12:56 PM.

  • #2
    Questions:

    Do you change your mill gap for roasted grains?

    What is your lautering procedure?

    Do you have a way of determining the amount of sediment in the wort going into the fermenter?

    How do you typically set up for filtration? I.e. Sights lashes, racking arm, yeast drops, crashing, etc.

    Thoughts: the dark color of the beer may be preventing you from observing sediment; most of the questions above are directed towards that. A mill gap for an efficient use of base malt often grinds roasted grains too finely. Also, if you normally use a sight glass to see if you have too much sediment flowing into the filter, the darker beer might be giving you a hard time.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by theomuller View Post
      Questions:

      Do you change your mill gap for roasted grains?

      What is your lautering procedure?

      Do you have a way of determining the amount of sediment in the wort going into the fermenter?

      How do you typically set up for filtration? I.e. Sights lashes, racking arm, yeast drops, crashing, etc.

      Thoughts: the dark color of the beer may be preventing you from observing sediment; most of the questions above are directed towards that. A mill gap for an efficient use of base malt often grinds roasted grains too finely. Also, if you normally use a sight glass to see if you have too much sediment flowing into the filter, the darker beer might be giving you a hard time.
      Hi Theo,

      We do not change the gap setting for black malts. This got me thinking about the fact that we used to use pre-milled black malt awhile back, and we didn't experience these filtration issues with the schwarzbier. I pulled a few samples from one of the schwarzbiers in our cellar last week and put it under the microscope. I could see quite a few small black flecks that could be very small black malt particles. We're going to try reverting back to pre-milled black malt for the next schwarzbier brew to see if this has any material effect on filtration.

      Cheers,
      Matt

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      • #4
        counts

        Matt, what was your yeast count at filtration? IMO most of the time you run into a filter problem it can be linked directly to how much material you have to filter out. Far more often the problem than anything else in my experience.
        cheers
        Larry Horwitz

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