Does clear wort taste better? Answer this question. Would you Rather have clear wort, or tasty beer? One of my favorite beers looks like muddy river water. Don’t get me wrong clear beer is impressive but taste comes first. Just my novice .02.
"Does clear wort taste better?"
See quotes below from Kunze and Fix. Clear wort impacts the quality and stability of the final product.
"Would you Rather have clear wort, or tasty beer?"
Again, see below. They go hand in hand. There is no separating the two.
"One of my favorite beers looks like muddy river water."
That's great. I also like some really hopped up beers that are cloudy due to the hopping schedule. And I like wheat beer too. But these beers are cloudy not because their wort was cloudy and their cloudiness doesn't bolster the argument that cloudy wort has no impact on beer.
Pick up a copy of Kunze's "Technology of Brewing and Malting", which is used in brewing courses around the world to educate those looking to go into the field professionally.
To quote Kunze in said book...
"During malting the lipids are partly broken down and this breakdown is continued during mashing. This breakdown will later be of great interest to us. A large part of the lipids is later precipitated with the trub. Cloudy lautering and poor trub excretion lead to large amounts of free fatty acids in the wort, which the yeast cells require to produce new cell substances, but which can also contribute to a reduction in flavour stability."
And another fellow named Fix agrees in his "Principals of Brewing Science", which is another book used in brewing education.
“The group of interest here is the long-chain, unsaturated fatty acids that are derived from malt. They are typically found in wort trub (i.e., particles suspended in the wort), which can consist of as much as 50% lipids (Meilgaard, 1977). Cloudy wort can contain anywhere from 5 to 40 times the unsaturated fatty-acid content of clear wort, an important fact because unsaturated fatty acids can have a significant negative effect even at low concentrations. On the positive side, fatty acids contribute to yeast viability via a number of mechanisms (see chapter 3), and they also inhibit the formation of some less pleasant acetate esters during fermentation (see chapter 3). On the negative side, they work against beer foam stability, as any fatty material does. Even more significantly, they play an important role in beer staling(see chapter 4). Thus, some investigations have reported that wort clarity (via trub removal) is essential (Zangrando, 1979), whereas other investigators have found some carryover of unsaturated fatty acids in the trub to be beneficial (Hough et al., 1981). In spite of these advantages, brewers still prefer clarified worts with minimum trub carryover, if for no other reason than the negative role wort-derived fatty acids play in beer staling. Another class of beer-staling constituents consists of fatty acids. In beer, fatty acids come from two sources, namely, unsaturated fatty acids from wort trub and saturated ones from yeast metabolism. As discussed in chapter 3, the saturated fatty acids can react with alcohols to form esters. The unsaturated fatty acids, on the other hand, are major players in beer staling. They tend to be fairly resistant to oxidation and spill over into the finished beer where they tend to produce “fatty or goaty notes.””
