Newbie question: filtering and bottles

Hi,

I've decided to start out easy today - I'm brewing from a liquid kit to make my life easier at first.

Anyways, I would love to have fairly sediment-free beer when I'm done...and I had a friend that said they used to pour their beer just before bottling through a Brita water filter...I want to know if this is a very bad idea, as I'm sure it must remove some of the yeast, etc, which would hurt the process.

Secondly, I read somewhere that you're not supposed to use clear bottles to bottle beer. Is this true?

Thanks,
Ian

Never heard of the Britta idea but as for the bottles from what I understand you are more sucseptible to light poisoning (skunking) with clear bottles

Bottle Conditioning will always leave sediment in the bottle from the yeast. Unless you have a counter-pressure filler and are force carbonating the bottles, you will always have sediment.

Clear glass lets more ultraviolet light in than brown glass, but unless your beer storage place had a ton of flourescent lights or you plan on keeping your beer on supermarket shelves for months, the glass won't really matter. Brown glass is better, though.

If you want clearer beer, consider using a secondary fermenter. Also, try a clarifying agent, like Irish moss, when brewing. But I wouldn't pour through a Brita filter!

Hmmm, is it wrong that this post made me consider using my water filter for beer?

SilverAnalyst said:

Hmmm, is it wrong that this post made me consider using my water filter for beer?

Click to expand...

Well, I use my Brita to prepare the water for brewing, but I think running the fermented beer through it before bottling would be a very bad idea. If you watch the way water trickles out of those things its easy to see they do a very good job of aerating liquids - in other words you will oxidise your beer and when you open your bottles they will probably taste of bad cider or wet cardboard.

This is great stuff, everyone. I think we've decided to just try it out exactly how our instructions say...which already included using a secondary fermenter. And we have a siphon rod, so we're likely to leave a lot of sediment behind.

We also decided to go out and purchase some distilled water, thanks to the mentioning of the Brita.

Thanks!!

Distilled water should be fine to fill up the siphon hose to start a siphon if that's the way you do it, but I wouldn't use it to brew with. The chemical reactions during fermentation rely on trace minerals and other properties of drinking water, which are absent in distilled water. I personally don't want to drink or brew with tap water, so I go to the grocery store and refill my big 5-gallon plastic jug with the Reverse Osmosis (RO) water. But then they take out the sodium, so I have to add that back in... Water chemistry can get as complicated as you want. But for brewing purposes, basically use any drinking water except distilled.

Thanks Thalon...you know what, after we went and got the distilled water, we both (my brother in law and I) that distilled might not be the best choice...did some more searching on this forum, and figured out that we'd be best off with the bottled spring water, which we used.

Thank goodness we didn't use the distilled...not that it would have likely totally killed our beer, but you never know.

I used distilled for my first ever brew becaused at the time I thought it was the best water to use. I later learned that its actually the worst drinkable water to use for brewing. The beer came out good, but I still would never use it again. Tap water for me now. If my tap water was bad I would use spring water, but never distilled.

Using a secondary will result in much clearer beer. I wish that I had started using one long before I did! Big difference in the clarity.

I and others on this forum would recomend getting a water data sheet from your water source its free and I have found they are always willing to chat about water chemistry when they know its for BEERY reasons
JMO
JJ