HL beer vs SQM filter area

[oppigards]

Dear beer firends,

I just want to ask a few of you who use DE horisontal filters, how big is your filter compared with how big is your filter run. We have a 2 sqm Velo filter and filter up to 80 HL beer. I think it takes to long time (3,5 hours). We do not have a separate valve for the last filter screen.

Best regards
Björn
Oppigårds Bryggeri

[gitchegumee]

Textbooks give a range of 8 - 10 hl/m**2/hr. So your 2 m**2 sounds like it's doing a fine job. Much also depends on your filtering techniques. Do you use a precoat? What kind? What is your body feed? At what rate? What yeast? From what kind of tank? How long has it been chilled? Finings? To what pressure is the filter operated? Etc, etc, etc. I also don't like filtering at all, but it is market dependent. Necessary evil when required. Sounds like you have good filtering protocol. Wish there was some way to make it happen without so much effort. Cheers!

[oppigards]

Well, we have yeasts which floc. very well. In fact we have chosen yeast strains to optimize filtration. We cold condition for 10 days, one more week makes one yeast strain mucher easier to filtrate, it is important to have a good flow through the filter so you do not warm up the beer and disolve the shill hazing proteins.

We are now optimizing the stand pipe length in conditioning tanks so we do not need to filtrate from the bottom of tank which is sometimes a mess.

Thanks for the drawing of the steels masher, we are constructing one ourselves when getting a proper auger in stainless steel. It will be easier to control in mash temp with a good pre masher, with a temp probe in the end of the steels masher which will tune the mix of hot and cold water.