Haze in my pale beers only?

Everytime I brew a pale beer (SRM 8 - 10) the beer is very cloudy for a few weeks, yet when I brew anything darker it is crystal clear within a week of being in the keg. I brew all my beers with S-04 yeast and tend to drink them very young - 1 week in the primary, 1 week in the keg, then straight into my belly. So why are my pale beers so cloudy? Thoughts?

because you're not allowing them time to clear. I really suggest using 3-4 week primary and at least 3 weeks in the keg. MUCH better beer will come with patience.

thisjrp4 said:

Everytime I brew a pale beer (SRM 8 - 10) the beer is very cloudy for a few weeks, yet when I brew anything darker it is crystal clear within a week of being in the keg. I brew all my beers with S-04 yeast and tend to drink them very young - 1 week in the primary, 1 week in the keg, then straight into my belly. So why are my pale beers so cloudy? Thoughts?

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I have noticed the same here, my hoppy pale ales have been consistently cloudy until my last, which is pretty clear. It has only been 3 weeks in the bottle as I do not yet keg, however, it was in the primary for about a month including dry hopping (2 oz, 1 of each Cascade and Amarillo, 7 days apart w/total time of 17 days...longer than I wanted) but it turned out great and as I drink one now that was chilled for about 8 hours, it is clear as crystal, and delicious!

Which leads me to consider settling time, which would come down to process and yeast strain (flocculation). I use WLP001 for my APA's, and have had better results with longer primary-ing. At any rate, give it some more time, ad let it chill longer.

If it happens to be chill haze from your process, then, no matter what you do haze will be a factor that longer conditioning will help with, but will not eliminate it. Having said that, chill haze does not affect flavor, only cosmetics.

Good luck, and keep researching as you brew, your beers will become better and your process will become more streamlined. Remember, chill haze can be reduced, but longer aging times will help to eliminate haze from suspended yeast.

What really confuses me is that all of my beers except my pale ales are crystal clear after a week in the keg.

Maybe your pale beers have more hops, and you have a hops haze that takes a while to clear?

Yooper right! My Sierra Nevad clone never cleared completely. I suspect it was the dry hopping. It alwasy had some haze. Not that I cared much, but after seeing how clear my cream ale was, it made me sad

Perhaps. I add 1.5 oz to my pale ale toward the end of the boil (0.5 - 10 min, 0.5 - 5 min, 0.5 - 0 min). I don't dry hop though. Right now on tap I have a brown ale to which I added 1 oz at 5 min and it is crystal clear. puzzling.

There could be some other factors here, but I'm not well versed in water chemistry.

It's possible that your mash pH is higher on the pale beers. My water is alkaline, and the pH is very high on pale beers since I'm not using dark malts to bring it down. So, I add some gypsum and sometimes CaCl2, depending on what my water spreadsheet says. I don't know how starch conversion, light colored malts and pH play out (I'm not nearly smart enough) but it's entirely possible that it's an issue like that.

What makes me simply blame hops haze, though, is that you say it does eventually clear. That makes me think it's either hops oils, or chill haze. I don't think a water chemistry issue would age out, especially that quickly.

I'm having a somewhat similar problem. I have been having a chill haze problems in all my beers until I brewed a robust porter recently. It was the first beer with a high quantity of roasted grains that I have brewed in a while, and it appears to be crystal clear (it's a little tough to tell because it's so dark).

Like Yooper said above, I'm thinking it may be a pH issue. More recently I have been adding salts to my mash to adjust pH, but I'm just going on calcs. I haven't been measuring my actual mash pH. It could be that the higher pH of the non-roasty mashes is extracting some extra stuff that's causing chill haze. I just got some ColorpHast strips, so this next batch I'm going to have to measure my actual pH and see if it matches up with my calculations.

YooperBrew said:

Maybe your pale beers have more hops, and you have a hops haze that takes a while to clear?

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Hop haze, I have never heard of that before, however it makes sense because only my hoppy beers present haze!

Thanks Yoop!

As soon as I started to adjust my water to hit my RA I have very little if any haze, even in very hop forward styles. Consider this, I currently am quaffing a very nice Rye IPA that used 8.5 ounces of hops, including 2 oz worth of dry hops. It was fermented for 2 weeks then dry hopped for 14 days. After bottling and sitting 3 weeks the first one upon chilling had zero haze. I made the same beer before I began adjusting my water and the beer exhibited haze for 4+weeks in the fridge until it started to clear up. Before that I always got fair bit of haze in any of the lighter styles, or at least the ones that you noticed it in! I found a quick change with the start of water adjustment. I usually adjust to hit the RA right in the middle of the SRM of the beer. So if I am brewing an 8 SRM beer, I usually like to hit and RA of 7-9 or 6-10 and so on. It seems to have worked well so far.

I agree with the others in saying that your water might be to blame. Proper mash pH is not only needed for good mash performance but also for a proper boil pH. The latter affects protein coagulation in the boil. Here is some info on that subject:http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_pH_affects_brewing#Protein_coagulation

Kai