Filtering

edawgwv · July 19, 2012, 2:20pm

Brewers:

Last night I used a whole home inline water filtration system to filter a batch of brew that had quite a bit of loose pellet hops dryhopping in a secondary carboy. (I also used it for a non-dryhopped brew, but didn’t see a huge clarity boost). I used gravity to push the beer through the 5 micron filter to the keg.

It was a success, I think. All the loose hops stayed out and I filtered almost every drop of beer. However, I wanted to get some thoughts from the forum on this process. Has anyone done this and did you find that it changed the taste of the beer in any way? The filter I used appears to be made of wound cloth – it looks like a spool. I am skeptical about keeping it dry and sanitized.

Any thoughts on this process? Pros/cons? I am inclined to do this for beers that require a lot of dryhops, but I don’t want to risk infecting and ruining a batch or some other unforeseen issue.

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

:cheers:

brans041 · July 19, 2012, 2:23pm

How easily did it flow? That’s interesting.

edawgwv · July 19, 2012, 2:28pm

Pretty easily. It was a bit slow on my test run. I think I had too much line, so I cut the hose to reduce line pressure and it flowed faster. It was still slower than usual but it came out fast enough. It took probably 10 minutes to transfer 5 gallons.

brans041 · July 19, 2012, 2:32pm

If you back flush the filter it should help, then just soak it in some star san.

hellbound · July 19, 2012, 3:54pm

+1 to soaking it. StarSan can be in your beer with no real downside as long as it’s not in mass quantity. so i would assume that if you just soak the filter in it and start the filtration while its still wet, you should be just fine.

mplsbrewer · July 19, 2012, 5:35pm

That sounds interesting, I always figured that gravity wasn’t enough to push beer through a filter but I guess I was wrong. A 5 micron filter isn’t enough to get yeast out is it? I think you need to get the very, very fine filters to affect the taste buy filtering out all the yeast and anything else leftover in the beer but what do I know, I’ve never done it. Let us know how it turns out.

shadetree · July 19, 2012, 6:04pm

IIRC, a 2-micron filter is the point where you start to strip beer flavor components.