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Crystal Clear Beer

jrbarley

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In this week's article, Brad talks about adding fining agents to the secondary a few days before bottling. He mentions that, along with the proteins and tannins, the fining agents attach to the yeast to bring them to the bottom. My question is this; Does this leave enough yeast in the beer to carbonate the beer in the bottle?
 
I was wondering the same thing but was thinking about fining because of a different topic.

I would suggest more than a few days. Kieselsol/Chitosan works as fast as I've seen and even though it says 48 hours I find if you let it go about 7-10 days (with wine) and rack carefully that is the last you'll see sediment in the carboy. Anything less and you'll probably end up with a film on the bottom plus at 48 hours what has dropped out isn't very compact.
 
jrbarley said:
My question is this; Does this leave enough yeast in the beer to carbonate the beer in the bottle?

Generally speaking you would want to rack off the fined beer and add more yeast and sugar for bottling.  There might be enough yeast left in suspension but there is no way to really tell.  The finings change the flocculation of the yeast and are not any fun in the bottle. 
 
jomebrew said:
The finings change the flocculation of the yeast and are not any fun in the bottle.

Could you explain/describe that?
Are you saying like the wine bottle I had that I had to brush and brush to get the sediment out? Or is there some other kind of no fun?
 
In simple terms, the finings attract the proteins and yeast by having a positive charge to their negative charge.  Depending on the yeast, the negative charge could be more or less.  I am not aware of any research that shows how well finings will work on different yeast strains (which is more about the amount of fining material you need to add). 

The fining sediment has a different makeup than the simple yeast flocculation.  If you don't rack off the sediment before bottling, you will end up with a mix of volatile fining sediment and more tightly coupled yeast sediment.  The fining sediment tends to stir up into the beer much more easily so when Weego fetches a beer from the fridge, there will be a lot more gunk floating around in the beer (look, I eventually got to the simple answer).

As for cleaning, I have no idea.
 
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