How Clear Is Your Beer?

Beer is more than just a great tasting beverage.  While many choose not to partake, beer is a large part of the American--indeed, even the human--experience.  Benjamin Franklin famously said "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."  The fact that a culture has grown up around the joy of making and enjoying fine beer testifies to how much beer has become part of our culture.  Enjoying beer is about far more than just the taste of the brew itself.  Beer is an experience, very much about where you have your beer, the company with whom you drink it, what you drink it out of, and how the beer looks in the glass.  And while you as a home brewer cannot control many of those factors, you can control the quality of the beer you make so it not only tastes great but is visually appealing as well.

If you pour a commercial beer from a bottle or a can, you may not be aware of how much those beer makers put into not just the taste but the affect your other senses have on the beer drinking experience.  The way the beer pours.  The aroma as you pour it.  The head of foam that wells up in your mug. How the beer looks in the glass.  These are all just as important as the beer's flavor.  The emphasis the big beer producers put on ascetics is so extreme that they even make the sound the can makes when you "pop a cold one" to be unique because they know that sound alone can prepare you to receive the taste of a great beer drinking experience.

The truth is none of that will change whether the beer itself is of high quality or is good to drink, but visual appeal matters.  One area of visual appeal that you have some control over when making your own beer at home is clarity.  Clarity simply refers to how the beer looks in the glass.  If you can see through the beer and it is a consistent beige or amber color, that is visually appealing.  But if things are floating around in the beer, even if they are perfectly harmless byproducts of the brewing process, that can diminish how inviting your beer is to enjoy and even diminish how enjoyable the beer is to drink even if the beer itself is of high quality.

A lot of the "stuff" that floats around in beer comes from the yeast that is crucial to the fermentation process, which makes beer beer.  Some yeasts are better than others about settling out of the beer during fermentation.  Another source of visible material in the beer comes from what is referred to as non-microbiological particles or NMPs which are a byproduct of the brewing process.  Again, none of these visible materials are harmful to consume nor do they reduce the value of the beer.  They just look bad and hurt the clarity of the beer which is one way beer is measured for quality.
Many of the NMPs are introduced during the initial creation of the wort which is phase one of any brewing operation.  The wort is boiled at a high temperature for a significant enough period of time to cause the proteins in the ingredients to break down and become part of the fluidity of the wort rather than remain in a substance state or a "floc" which remains visible in the finished product.  To avoid this make sure your boil sustains a temperature of 215F for 60-90 minutes to assure complete processing of the proteins.

Another important brewing step that you can do to reduce visible agents in your beer is to cool the wort very quickly.  It is, of course, advisable to cool your wort quickly anyway in order to get the yeast working as soon as possible and avoid hang time that allows bacteria and wild yeasts to contaminate your brew.  But by bringing the temperature down rapidly, the clarity is vastly enhanced as well.  When you transfer the cooled wort into your fermentation vessel, be sure to leave behind the debris that is in the bottom of the brewing kettle--in addition to spent hops, there is what is called "cold break," which has a lot of solidified proteins that lead to cloudy beer.  As a beginning home brewer, I used several methods to cool my wort--ice baths in the kitchen sink, leaving the wort in a sealed fermenter outside overnight, and even sinking the hot kettle in a snowbank for an hour or so, but by far the best method, for a minimal investment of money, is an immersion chiller.  This is a simple apparatus made of metal (usually copper) tubing coiled up so it fits into your brewing pot, and some rubber hose or tubing.  Cold water flows in one end, takes on heat transferred from the hot wort liquid, and comes out hot on the other end.  A simple wort chiller can bring five gallons of boiling wort down to yeast pitching temperature in ten to fifteen minutes.  A scaled-up version of the wort chiller is the counter flow chiller, but while highly recommended for being faster and more efficient at chilling your wort, a regular single-direction immersion chiller is certainly sufficient and gives you plenty of bang for your buck.

Finings, or additives, are another option for keeping your beer clear.  Irish moss, isinglass, gelatin, and bentonite are all products added either during the boil or after fermentation that clear your beer (or wine, in some cases!) at the microscopic level.

If you want to get really involved in clearing your brew, there's always filtration, which we'll talk about in more depth another time.

Seeking beer clarity can become a major passion of yours as a home brewer and there is a whole science to using clarifying agents such as Irish Moss to enhance beer clarity without diminishing beer quality or taste.  Learning good techniques for making your beer clear and appealing is just another step in your ongoing quest to become the best amateur beer maker possible.  And that is a quest worth pursuing!