My first AG brew - very cloudy?

[grafvonbarnez]

So I did my first all grain brew this weekend, and it was a great success! I hit my temperature targets dead on with a single infusion + mash out, and my cooler-style tun only lost ~1.5 degrees over the hour conversion rest. Fly sparging it worked great with no difficulties and I got just over 80% efficiency. Iodine test was negative for starch and the whole thing smelled great! Not bad for a first whack at it. (I'm assuming it was beginner's luck and my next all grain brew will be a disaster XD)

However, three days into fermentation, it's incredibly cloudy. Not like regular beer and yeast and floating crap cloudy, or at least not like I've seen on any of my previous extract brews. It looks like churned up silt in a river, or very chunky brown milk. When I went from kettle to carboy it was a dark brown syrupy color with a little hop scum (and seemed too dark for the pale ale I intended it to be), but clear, nothing like it is now.

All of my previous brews were much darker than a pale ale, so this might have been going on and I just couldn't see it? Will it just clear naturally? If it doesn't is there anything I can do? Even if it didn't affect the flavor, I'd have to drink it with my eyes closed with how bad it looks.

I'm probably just being crazy paranoid here, but I was planning to secondary and dry hop it in a few days, so if there's some intervention I should take then I don't want to miss my chance.

Thanks, all!

 

[prandlesc]

Congratulations on your first all-grain batch!..Your description sounds like you have great process control and I'm certain you'll have some great beer. All-grain brewing is different than extract brewing in that you will have a lot of the "solids" of the grain in your wort - called trub. As is settles to the bottom during fermentation your beer will clear. Your next step is - WALK AWAY FROM YOUR CARBOY!!. Let it sit a couple of weeks before you worry about cloudiness. You'll then need to be careful when you transfer into your bottling bucket or keg so that you don't take much (or ideally any) of the trub with the beer. I've found that an auto-siphon works well as it keeps the bottom of the up off the bottom of the carboy. Leaving the trub in the carboy and not your bottling bucket will help you keep your eyes open when you serve your beer.

Best of luck!

 

[GotPushrods]

Since your other extract brews were dark beer, you didn't see this.

Fermentation is a cloudy, nasty looking beast. When it's really rocking, you see what looks like chunks of curdled milk blowing around in there. It's totally normal. When they are finished doing the nasty, they will politely fall to the bottom and things will clear.

 

[grafvonbarnez]

Well, I feel rather embarrassed now. Just over 96 hours into fermentation and its already noticeably clearer as the yeast is starting to fall. I thought I had managed to move past the "oh god what's it doing is my beer ruined" phase of being a beginner homebrewer. Thanks for the advice guys!

One of the reasons I overreacted is that this is the first time I've used Irish moss in a brew, and the first time I've whirlpooled while cooling with my immersion chiller. As soon as I took the wort off the heat it cleared immediately, with floating columns of clumpy break material. But as soon as I started whirlpooling the clumps spread out through the entirety of the pot and didn't seem to want to fall. I got a lot more break material at the bottom of the pot after I siphoned, but also a whole lot went into the fermenter. Are these two things that shouldn't be combined?

 

[Iceman6409]

We have all been there too. The key to all this is patience. It's hard at first but the more you do it and see the results with patience the even better your beer gets. It's especially hard to wait when you do your first bottling. You just can't wait to dive into it to taste it. That is when your patience will pay off. I personally have found that two weeks after bottling is just fine. 3 weeks is even better tasting. 4 weeks is even better and so on. Depending on what beer you make it may be suggested to let it condition for a month or more. Hard to wait but SOOOOOOOOOO worth it in the end. And I say while you are waiting - brew something else

 

[grafvonbarnez]

I finally got to taste this beer today, (did two weeks primary, one week dry hopping in secondary, and 4 weeks in the bottles) and damn! My best beer yet, head and shoulders above my extract brews. I know some people get great results from extract, but I'm so glad I decided to go all grain.

Edit: And now I'm even more embarrassed about my previous hand-wringing about the cloudiness. It turned out to be the clearest beer I've made so far.