[quote=“tom sawyer”]By removing trub you can fit more good wort in a fermentor. Since you need some headspace, you can slightly overfiull knowing you’ll drian off some volume and be where you want to be.
Dave Miller can make whatever statements he wants, it doesn’t mean its true. I have not read a citation that backs that up, and as I said there is so much empirical evidence to the contrary. What would be the mechanism anyway? Trub stress yeast? Raises ferm temp? I don’t think so.
As for clarity, I’ve seen no correlation between trub/no trub and calrity of final beer. Trub is denatured protein, and denautred protein does not refold and become soluble again. I gave you a theoretical reason why it might well aid in clarity, but I’ve not seen any effect either way.
I certainly don’t mind arguing a point with you and I’m not expecting to convert you, but this adds to the knowledge base and gives other some information to consider before they make their own decisions.
FYI I use an IC and whirlpool, and generally use Supermoss. I let things settle before racking and leave most of my trub behind. My primary purpose is to keep trub out of my yeast cake so I can reuse it.[/quote]
I’m not sure how to take your statement. The correlation between the presence of trub in the fermenter and the clarity of the final product seems pretty obvious to me. If it’s filtered out as much as possible before it goes into the fermenter, there’s less of it there to filter out again when it’s time to transfer the beer to a bottling vessel, right? And why do you ask what the mechanism is for removing trub when you’re posting about exactly what you do to remove it yourself? And why do you use an IC and a whirlpool if you don’t think that trub doesn’t have a negative impact in beer? Why don’t you just use a plain old racking cane and call it good? I’m sincerely not trying to be argumentative for it’s own sake, but it seems to me that you must believe that excessive amounts of trub in the fermenter at least has the potential to negatively impact the final product, or you wouldn’t go to such lengths to filter it out. I have to believe that you must have some reasoning behind your process besides just aesthetic considerations. Would you care to expound on that?
I already said why I remove trub, simply and solely so that the yeast cake is cleaner and has more yeast cells per volume after fermenting. I often harvest and reuse yeast for several generations and its nice for it to be mostly yeast so I can better estimate my pitching rate without having to wash.
As for it being obvious that trub makes beer cloudy, exactly not. Stuff that settles out easily won’t affect clarity. Hot/cold break settles out quite nicely and it won’t redissolve during fermentation. It settles out nicely once the yeast are done and drop out. No need for a homebrewer to filter beer to get it bright. Cloudiness is more often the result of protein haze, but its proteins that are soluble at ferm temps and only drop out at refrigeration temps. This is definitely not trub which is already insoluble at room temp. Trub doesn’t re-dissolve, this is not the nature of proteins. Once they denature they stay that way.
[quote=“tom sawyer”]I already said why I remove trub, simply and solely so that the yeast cake is cleaner and has more yeast cells per volume after fermenting. I often harvest and reuse yeast for several generations and its nice for it to be mostly yeast so I can better estimate my pitching rate without having to wash.
As for it being obvious that trub makes beer cloudy, exactly not. Stuff that settles out easily won’t affect clarity. Hot/cold break settles out quite nicely and it won’t redissolve during fermentation. It settles out nicely once the yeast are done and drop out. No need for a homebrewer to filter beer to get it bright. Cloudiness is more often the result of protein haze, but its proteins that are soluble at ferm temps and only drop out at refrigeration temps. This is definitely not trub which is already insoluble at room temp. Trub doesn’t re-dissolve, this is not the nature of proteins. Once they denature they stay that way.[/quote]
I’m well aware that trub does not dissolve in wort, and that, for me, is beside the point. Coffee grounds ( which, incidentally, have a protein content by weight that’s very close to that of malted barley- about 14%) don’t fully dissolve in water, either, but would you say that the flavor of coffee comes from anything else besides the grounds it’s been flavored with, even after the grounds have been totally left behind in the filter, except maybe the mineral content of the water? And it goes without saying by any brewer, professional or otherwise, that hops are notoriously indissoluble, requiring at least 60 minutes of boiling to extract even a small fraction of their potential flavor compounds into the wort. Does that mean that that what goes into the fermenter in the way of particulate hop matter doesn’t in any way affect the flavor of the beer? Hardly. I guess the issue for me is not so much about the solubility of the trub, but simply the fact that it’s there, and in the professional opinion of numerous experts of many people in the beer world (besides just Dave Miller), it has a definite potential to help create off-flavors and other undesirable characteristics such as astringency and fusel alcohols in beer, whether it’s fully dissolved in the beer, or settled to the bottom of the fermenter, or not. I respect your experience and I’m sure you know what you’re doing with your own beer, but I think you’ll find very few, if any, experts in the beer world who will back up your claim that trub is totally harmless in beer.
