For me, it starts during the recipe design phase. I usually have an aesthetic in mind for a beer when I am pondering what sort of flavor profile we are pursuing. If I am designing a lager, 99% of the time, I picture that crystal clear glass of lager sitting on a table with tiny beads of condensation forming on the glass while you savor each sip. When we brew lagers, the cold aging process (i.e. lagering) removes most of the yeast and haze from the beer. And if we waited even longer than our standard 6 week process, eventually all of it would fall out of solution (see Wandervogel: Mosaic, started on tap fairly hazy, now its very clear). But alas, more beer must be brewed, so sometimes we will send a lager through the filter so that it can meet that mind eye’s expectation of brilliantly clear but also fit inside the timelines of a busy production brewery. The filter is the most aggressive tool at our disposal to clear beer and it removes yeast, proteins, hops, a slice of everything that is above that nominal 12 micron rating. So we tend to only employ it on beers that we expect to be brilliantly clear which are usually beers that don’t have a ton of yeast derived aromatics or dry-hop aroma/flavor.
Fining is our second method for clearing up a beer. Fining describes the process of adding a processing aide to a beer, usually of a positively charged nature to help speed up sedimentation and flocculation of the yeast. Brewers yeast, at beer pH, after fermentation, is typically of a negative charge and so when you introduce a positively charged colloidal solution to the beer, you attract the yeast cells and as more and more of them stick together, they fall out of the beer faster (if you’ve been on a Triptych tour, we talk about this process and about Stoke’s law which describes that the bigger a particle is , the faster it falls out of solution). In the old days of English brewing, a common fining agent was Isinglass. Made of dried swim bladders of fish, Isinglass proved to be a reliable way to compact yeast, hops, and protein to make a clear pint of English cask beer. Gelatin is another animal derived product which is still fairly commonly used in American craft brewing. At Triptych, when we fine a beer, we use a product derived from silica (i.e. quartz sand) called Biofine. Completely vegan, inert, and effective, we introduce Biofine early enough in the process and at a small enough dosage level that it does not carry forward into the packaged beer. We often utilize Biofine on beers that have historically been clear at Triptych, Dirty Hippy, Little Secret, Galloping Ghost, beers that we anticipate the filtering process having a negative effect on.
Make no mistake though, fining or filtering, or even just waiting 6-8 weeks for a beer to naturally clear, changes the flavor profile of the beer. For some of our beers this is appropriate, but for aggressively fruited sours or aggressively dry-hopped New England style IPAs, we find au naturel to be best for the beer. So whether the Triptych beer in your glass is brilliantly clear, somewhat hazy or completely opaque, you can be sure that we made a conscious decision for the best of the beer.
In the picture below… on the left is a batch of Little Secret from February and pictured on the right is an upcoming, special edition batch from March featuring Strata hops. One batch is fined, one batch isn’t, can you see which is which?
