Adventures in production home brewing part 2

Last week I filtered the session pale ale. Man. "The kit" from The Filter Store worked beyond my expectations. I'm ecstatic that I don't have to deal with paper filters ever again.

If you remember, I brewed the beer, fermented it for 5 days, pitched polyclar finings into it, and crashed it at 38 degrees for two days. Since I ferment in sanke kegs, I installed the sanitized spear in the sanke, applied 5 psi of pressure, then ran the cloudy beer through the filter. The picture below gives you an idea of what the .5 micron filter accomplished. For what it's worth, the finished beer was a bit clearer than the hydrometer jar would let on, as the test draw was still pulling sediment that from the bottom of the keg that ended up clearing out about a half gallon into the transfer.

As I was hoping, I was able to get the entire 10 gallons through the filter without it jamming up. With my paper filters, I was able to get about 6 gallons through one pair of filters.

Pushing from the sanke fermenter, through the filter, and into a sanitized corny keg at 5 psi

The filter during use

Just before backflushing. Look at all the yeast at the bottom.

Backflushing...the filter came back out clear with only 2 visible patches of yeast/residue

Filtered, force carbonated, then bottled. This was about 4 hours later once I was home.

I carbonated the beer by applying 30psi of pressure and shaking the keg for three minutes. Although it was "pouring" perfect drafts, I'm a little worried at how the carbonation level will be once it is in the bottles. It's really hard to tell what the actual carbonation level will turn out to be once it's pushed from the keg through the Blichmann beer gun and into a bottle. I've had best results getting the beer and bottles as cold as possible and pushing the beer as close to 10psi as possible, then capping on foam.

Once again, this is far from how I want to brew every beer, but it was a great exercise in process and equipment. I'm confident in this new filter to use on any batch that I want commercial beer clarity on and can't afford the time to allow the beer to clear via gravity.

How did the beer taste? I saved a bottle, so I will do an in-depth review later. It was tasty though. I did a side by side with the flat beers - pre-filtering and post-filtering - and did not notice a perceptible difference in aroma. This beer was not dry hopped though. More volatile dry hop aroma and flavor is where I would be most worried that I'd lose out. The flavor was much cleaner than the pre-filtered sample, as would be expected.

The plan worked: a tasty beer that accomplished what I needed it to, brewed, fermented, fined, filtered, carbonated, and bottled in 7 days.