Bottle Conditioning

[dumbfounded]

Can anyone give me some help on what kind of filter to use to clear a beer up, but still have enough yeast to bottle condition.

[yog]

Bottle conditioning

In my experience, we use a plate/frame filter and filter all the yeast out, then prime and repitch in a bright tank or CT. Let the beer ferment out, then rack it to your bright tank. That means that you can control yeast levels and carbonation. Trying to filter out x% of yeast sounds like a sure route to madness.
There are sheets out there that will take out less than 100% of foreign bodies in beer, so you should have a word with your sheet supplier, however I would still recommend that you strip out everything then prime and repitch.

[MJMurphy]

I agree with YOG. The best method is to filter the beer and then add both the yeast and priming sugar in the conditionig tank prior to bottling. Depending on the amount of residual sugar in your beer, you may not need to add priming sugar.

Doing it this way will allow you to more tightly control the conditioning process.

That said, you can bottle condition without filtration, but I would not recommend relying on the initial yeast to do the job. For the beers we bottle condition we allow them to age in the fermenter for up to several months depending on the style. We pull yeast off the bottom of the cylindrocononical tanks daily (part of the daily yeast and trub pulling). By the time we rack them into the bright tank, they are fairly bright. The yeast count is low enough, and between the high abv and age of the yeast, we can esentially ignore it in our calculations.

From there we measure exisiting CO2 and the residual sugar. We then calculate how much CO2 we need to produce to achieve the target. From that we can calculate the amount of yeast and priming sugar we need to add based on the current CO2 and sugar levels.

The priming calculations are widely available in the brewing books and on the web.