Adding gelatin uniformly in a carboy

I'm contemplating adding gelatin to the IPA I have about ready for bottling in a Better Bottle. I'm wondering how I can add it through the bottleneck and get it evenly spread out across the beer surface area to drop uniformly.

I don't want to stir or swirl for obvious oxygenation issues. It seems if I simply pour it in through the bottleneck it may drop through the middle of the batch and clear up only whatever it hits on the way down from there.

OR - will it spread out like "the blob" and drop from there?

Thanks in advance.

I don't believe you will "oxygenate" your beer by swirling it. I have done it before with no effects. If it were so easy to do, then wort aeration wouldn't take a whole minute of pure oxygen running through a diffusion stone. Plus, there is probably a layer of carbon dioxide left over from fermentation.

But for the actual question, I just dumped it into my carboy with slight swirling and the whole thing cleared up.

Thanks. Did you cold crash too? The only way I can do that is my garage. And I'm worried about temperature swings there.

I just dump the gelatin into the carboy. It should diffuse on it's own.

Cold crashing is the best way to clear beer. If your garage is cold, get your beer in there. You'll see.

Mix the gelatin up in a small amount of warm water. Then when poured in, it will rise to the top and spread out. As it cools it will sink and carry all the cloudy stuff to the bottom.

Works for me.

passedpawn said:

If your garage is cold, get your beer in there. You'll see.

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Hey, my garage is cold. In fact, by tomorrow morning I expect it to be near -20 in my garage. Are you sure I should put my beer in there to cold crash? I think it will be a solid lump by morning.

Nope I didn't even cold crash since I have no room for it. The beer was almost crystal clear after a few weeks in the bottle.

Hold up, see BierMuncher's post (#2) on this thread:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f13/cold-crash-then-add-gelatin-111273/

He argues the opposite. I see the logic in letting chill haze form before clearing with gelatin, but obviously I don't want a lava lamp carboy if the gelatin will congeal if added to cold beer. I could see letting chill haze form then warming it back up to room temp and adding gelatin, but my guess is unless the chill haze is there to clear (ie the beer is chilled) then you can't clear it warm.

the gelatin will not turn to jello as long as you dont boil it.

RM-MN said:

Hey, my garage is cold. In fact, by tomorrow morning I expect it to be near -20 in my garage. Are you sure I should put my beer in there to cold crash? I think it will be a solid lump by morning.

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errr... maybe not then. Frankly, I'd be surprised if your garage gets that cold, but then I live in sunny FL (75F today) so what do I know.

I live in northern Minnesota. When I had a thermometer in the garage it would occasionally show as low as -30. Of course the garage is uninsulated and the outside temperature sometimes gets more than -50. It probably won't really get to -20 in there tonight since it was warm outside during the day. It got up to 12 and that means the garage will probably only go down to -10 tonight (-20 outside temp predicted).