We bought a Maheen

[revolutioned]

The brewery that I work at bought a Maheen bottle filler. I have been reading about stabilizing beer to help with shelf life. I would like to know what others are doing to lengthen the life of their bottles. I have a few questions:
1. does anyone filter from FV into bright (if so what size filter and what fining)?
2. should we filter to another tank from bright before bottling?
3. What finings should we use (we use clarity ferm at knockout)?
4. should we pull off of FVs during fermentation, transfer to bright, crash and then just bottle?
I would like to know a process from knockout to bottling that has worked really well. Thanks for your help.

[GlacierBrewing]

The brewery that I work at bought a Maheen bottle filler. I have been reading about stabilizing beer to help with shelf life. I would like to know what others are doing to lengthen the life of their bottles. I have a few questions:
1. does anyone filter from FV into bright (if so what size filter and what fining)?

Yes we filter our beers from the FV to the Brite tank. I use a Velo 40x40, Seitz K-700 pads, no other finings.

2. should we filter to another tank from bright before bottling?

I would filter from the FV to another tank. Carb the beer in that tank and bottle out of it.

3. What finings should we use (we use clarity ferm at knockout)?

I wouldn't use any other finings, but that is just me.

4. should we pull off of FVs during fermentation, transfer to bright, crash and then just bottle?
I would like to know a process from knockout to bottling that has worked really well. Thanks for your help.

I would temp crash in the FV, transfer/filter into a brite, carb it up, bottle your heart out!
Prost!
Dave

[jmg]

3. What finings should we use (we use clarity ferm at knockout)?

I'm curious about this, are you actually adding clarity ferm at knockout? I would have thought the enzymes would have been denatured by the heat.

[froptus]

Hi there,

We're a 7bbl brewpub that uses a 1996 Meheen to bottle our 12oz brands. The only fining we use is irish moss at the end of the boil to help with filtration and general clarity. After fermentation and diacetyl rest we crash the beer to 45 F for one day then down to 33 F for several days until filtration. We use a 2 sq. meter DE filter but we use perlite as our filter media instead of DE. We filter from the FV to the Brite tank. We force carbonate in the Brite tank. Then we'll bottle on the Meheen at around 2.65 volumes CO2 at 33-35 F with 22-23 psi in the Brite tank. We've been doing this for years and it all works well. Shelf life is typical for a non bottle conditioned craft brew, 1-3 months until oxidation is fairly apparent. Do everything you can throughout the process to reduce O2 pickup. We always do everything we can to make sure the consumer gets the freshest beer possible including not bottling until an order comes in to us. Beer always does better in the tank than in the bottle.

We've never used any other finings because we use a very flocculent house yeast and of course we filter.

Good luck with the Meheen. They are definitely good machines as long as you don't have one of the earliest models before the bugs were worked out.

[revolutioned]

Sorry JMG, I did not mean to be unclear. We dump clarity ferm when the beer has been cooled.