I failed at the cheese cloth filtering method while kegging

I brewed an all-grain Berliner Weisse in September that received a Rhubarb and Strawberry addition in November and I kegged it yesterday.

The Pellicle + fruit particles made racking this beer no fun. So I put cheese cloth on both ends of the siphon...nothing came through. I tried using less cheese cloth, only using it on one side and in both cases, the auto-siphon simply would just trickle beer through.

So I gave up and dealt with the little white specks of pellicle and strawberry seeds that came through. The beer won't look very appealing but my FG reading / tasting was perfect. It tastes fantastic but the white pellicle specks just look disgusting.

Question: How do you filter your beer? Are there some guides on filtering out all particles in a homebrewing setup so the beer looks nicer..most of my iPAs have hop particles in them as well.

:rockin:

I would wait until the yeast drops. Usally cold crashing helps. Put the carboy in the frig for a day or so at cold temputures and rack off the clear stuff.

Also do you use fining agents?

Another option would be to use a filters, I have heard that those can be cumbersome and clog frequently. I have personally never used them and after cold crashing and racking my beer comes out clear.

About hopping, in the boil use a paint strainer from the hardware store, after chilling the wort place the strainer over the 6 gallon plastic bucket and pour. After its all in the bucket squeeze out the hops and what ever remains in the boil if you use adjuncts. If your dry hopping I would use a nylon bag with a few aquarium stones and put it into the keg. I am not sure what is the preferred method of bottling and dry hoping, as I always keg my beers.

good points.

1. I did a cold crash at 31 degrees for 24 hours. Ice started to form on the top..the fruit was still all sitting at the top, pellicle semi-intack and still some movement with the bottom "yeast cake" which was primarily made up of strawberry remnants.
2. I did use 1 tablet of whir floc
3. I have a filter but it almost always clogs.
4. This was only a 3.5% beer so there wasn't much to filter out.. Berliner weisse is very low ABV..it seems the gunk was all fruit and the fruit doesn't cold crash like hops and yeast do.

I guess the only thought is next time I do fruit additions, I use a muslin bag that I would normally use for dry hopping. That way the fruit remnants all remain in the bag. But I really thought someone on here would have a cheese cloth expertise as to how to do it properly.

I'm no beer filtering expert (let's just get that out of the way)... but I will say that cheesecloth sucks. Just about anytime I see instructions to use it now, I start looking for alternatives. There are other fabrics that will work as good if not better. The cotton (or whatever) in standard cheesecloth is just awful, IMO.

Nylon bags I use for boiling hops would be my first choice, but you're still always going to run into the same crazy balancing act: The smaller the holes in whatever filter you use, the more chance they clog... because they're catching more stuff.

I have a fibre filter for my Toddy system (cold press coffee filtering)... you could look into rigging up some kind of system to use those on either end of your siphon. Just a thought.

funny you mentioned this, after a bunch of hops clogged my keg a couple times last time I decided to use cheeesecloth this time.

Total pain in the ass, constant clogs.

The only way I could get this to work was to basically keep my hand in the beer so I could remove obstructions regularly with my thumb.

Nice clean keg though...

Paint strainer bags from a hardware store work awesome. I cut off a piece, just big enough to fit on the bottom of my autosiphon and wrap a rubber band around that. (sanitized of course). I use this for filtering hop material after dry hopping. Works great.

Clonefan94 said:

Paint strainer bags from a hardware store work awesome. I cut off a piece, just big enough to fit on the bottom of my autosiphon and wrap a rubber band around that. (sanitized of course). I use this for filtering hop material after dry hopping. Works great.

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Works great yea, but I would prefer to add the cool wort in the plastic pale after I attach the paint strainer around the bucket, after the boil, and after the wort has been chilled. Not sure this would work after the beer has been siting on the hops after a week or so. Oxidation might happen from too many rackings. Its better to use a nylon mesh bag in the keg for dry hopping. This way the beer gets flavored, and its easy to dispose of the hops once the keg has been emptied.

CloneFan, do you mean do you mean dry hopping in the secondary or carboy?