Does beer condition/age if you filter out all the yeast before kegging?

[Driftwood]

Need someone to settle a bet here.

My buddy filters his home brew before kegging with like 99% efficiency at 2 microns. So that means most, if not all, the yeast is gone.

So will his beer condition/age in the keg once he's done this?

 

[Sasquatch]

Well, since no one has answered this, I would say that if you managed to filter out all the yeast (and I will say, I have no idea how big a yeast cell is, so you may or may not be able to do so...) you would have a beer which would have no reason at all to change in any way. Which is to say, if you filter out all the yeast, the only "conditioning" in the keg would be sedimentation of any leftover proteins and whatnot... which may also have been filtered out at that stage. So my guess is that taste wise, not much is going to change.

 

[awillis]

If you can filter with that high of efficiency their will be no significant change in the taste of the brew, to which the tongue can differentiate. Coagulated proteins will certainly be filtered out for the immense size( still very,very small units). Now yeast are very huge compared to bacteria but smaller than coagulated proteins. What little yeast escape the filter, will not alter the flavor of 5 gal. or more of brew. I suspect if not force carbonated, little natural carbonation will take place with this situation. Hope the bet came in your favor!

 

[Sir Sudster]

You win..the beers dead.

 

[Driftwood]

As I suspected... Thanks, guys, I win...

 

[Janx]

You definitely win...that's why big beers like many Belgians bottled with live yeast are so much more complex and age in such interesting ways. If the yeast is gone, all you get is bad aging, like the hops skunking and deteriorating.

Cheers!

 

[Driftwood]

You definitely win...that's why big beers like many Belgians bottled with live yeast are so much more complex and age in such interesting ways. If the yeast is gone, all you get is bad aging, like the hops skunking and deteriorating.

Cheers!

When you say big beers, you don't mean commercial beers, do you?

Are there any commercial beers that rely on this? Or do all the big boys filter everything out?