Gelatin in secondary?

After reading the gelatin is no joke post I am considering doing this for an amber ale I have sitting in my secondary right now that is going to be kegged in about a week. I just want to know if any of you see a problem with this process:

1) Crash cool (sometime soonish)
2) Add gelatin to secondary (after a couple days of cooling)
3) Leave in secondary until beginning of the month at which point I keg.

I want nice clear amber ale for my super bowl party

Perfect process...

Does gelatin work on carbed beer? I have an IPA that wont clear.

Doc Robinson said:

Perfect process...

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Awesome, thanks!

netjunk1e said:

Does gelatin work on carbed beer? I have an IPA that wont clear.

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My understanding of gelatin (and I could be wrong) is thus:

When you dissolve the gelatin powder in the warm water, you break the bonds that hold the collagen protein chains together. When poured into your beer, instead of just bonding back together when they cool (as in jello), they bond with the free floating proteins in the beer, thus dropping them out of solution. Chemically, I dont see why it wouldnt work on carbonated beer, though, I dont know what effect the pressure would have on it.

Id be curious to see if anyone has tried it...

Check the gelatin is no joke thread, I read some of it this morning and I recall somebody saying not to do it, though I am not sure why. (that is adding gelatin to carbonated beer)

I would think it would be better to add the gelatin to the beer at fermentation temp and then crash cool. If you add gelatin to an already cold liquid wont it coagulate fast and maybe the possibility of it instantly turning into clumpy jello? I though it would be more beneficial to add gelatin and then slowly cool the beer? This is just my opinion.

Good question....anyone?

You wouldn't turn it into jello unless you cooked the gelatin at boiling temperatures before cooling. Another advantage to cooling first is there is less work for the gelatin to do. The crash cooling should settle out a lot of the crap to begin with.

I have always added gelatin to a carboy secondary and then racked from primary into secondary on top of gelatin to mix it up, then crash cooled a few days and then racked to keg. It always comes out crystal clear. A lot of people use gelatin and don't crash cool and it still works, so either way I'm sure it will clear up fine. Most threads I have read advise to add gelatin to beer and then cool, so the gelatin can evenly distribute and mix up in beer before it gets a chance to get cold and fall out too fast.

Skacorica said:

Good question....anyone?

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Add gelatin to room temperature beer.

Adding to chilled beer...it will just coagulate and drop tot he bottom.

netjunk1e - If you dry hopped, not likely you'll get a clear beer. Dry hopping causes a persistent haze (not a bad thing) in IPA's. If you decide to try...get the keg back to room temp first.

BierMuncher said:

Add gelatin to room temperature beer.

Adding to chilled beer...it will just coagulate and drop tot he bottom.

netjunk1e - If you dry hopped, not likely you'll get a clear beer. Dry hopping causes a persistent haze (not a bad thing) in IPA's. If you decide to try...get the keg back to room temp first.

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i'm not sure i agree. i've only used gelatin once, fairly recently, when i couldn't get an APA to clear after a couple of weeks in the keg. i added gelatin to the keg, let it sit for 2 days and it's now clear as a bell.

admittedly, this was carbed beer, so it's possible that the carbonation released by the agitation of adding the gelatin caused some turbulence that allowed it to have this effect. but whatever the case, it worked like a charm.

I've always crash cooled before gelatin and it's always works really well. If you do it at room temperature, you can still get chill haze when the wort cools. It's true that time clarifies most beer, but the junk is still in the bottom of the corny. It always seems somebody bumps my kegerator just before a gathering, and the first few pints are murkey.

this is an interesting thread. Maybe we should start a poll as to who adds gelatin before or after cooling? My vote would be before...