Is There A Trend Towards Unfiltered Beer, Even Non-Cask?

[G.M. Gillman]

A realization has gained in recent years that more and more, craft beer, of any style, is being served unfiltered. Of course, the beer is allowed to settle when chilled in conditioning but the final "polishing" either through centrifuge, mechanial filters or even finings seems dispensed with increasingly.

This is not universal to be sure, and many crafts still come with good clarity, but I see way more unfiltered beers than I used to whether here, in the U.S., and even on a trip to England last year.

Germany has a tradition of serving wheat beers in this form, Belgium too. There is also the German Keller, "unbunged", zoigl, and other forms of unfiltered lager you can find in some small breweries and brewpubs there. These are exceptions to the rule that lager is filtered in Germany and from what I've read of its history, this was always regarded as desirable both from a palate and stability point of view. Ditto in the U.K. I can't recall reading in the hundreds of English brewing texts and other sources on brewing I've consulted that, apart the exceptions noted, beer should be served cloudy. Every writer I've read agreed it should be clarified. This was done either by long standing if the yeast was not highly flocculating or more generally by fining the beer with isiniglass (fish-sounds, from the bladder, which by positive and negative charges draw the majority of the yeast and protein in the beer to the bottom in a web).

While it is hard sometimes to separate the aesthetic side from the gustatory, I find beer tastes better fined or reasonably filtered. This means a beer bright to the eye but which still contains some residual yeast (all such beer does). Even well-filtered but unpasteurised craft beer, when made from high quality ingredients, tastes better to me than cloudy ale. Beer that is cloudy tends to highlight the yeast taste, with the malt and hops assuming a subsidiary role. Yet, much (not all) cask beer I've seen in North American is served opalescent, unlike the situation which still obtains generally in England, home of this kind of beer.

I feel this has resulted possibly from a misapprehension in the New World as to what unfiltered real ale means, but anyway it is too late now to revisit this question: much of the real ale poured here assumes this form and people evidently like it.

I'd be interested in people's thoughts on this question of filtered vs. unfiltered. Do you have a preference on one form over another? Any ideas why the unfiltered form of craft beer seems to be prevalent today? Does it come from the idea that beer should be as "natural" as possible?

Of course, I am talking mainly about draft beer. Bottled craft beer is usually sold filtered or if bottle-conditioned, one can allow the bottle enough rest time to let yeast drop. But on the draft side, we now have a situation where a lot of what is being poured is cloudy to various degrees whereas by my own observation, in the 80's and 90's this was rare except for wheat beer, and cask beer to be sure, but there was very little cask beer then.

Gary

[Tapsucker]

As a homebrewer I find cold conditioning gets me very clear beer, maybe not polished, but it appears close to equivalent craft beers. This may mean they are only cold conditioning too, I've never thought about it until now.

I have stored kegs of cold conditioned beers at basement temperatures (~15-18C) for weeks at a time. Once the beer was served, I noticed very little new yeast growth if at all. When cleaning the keg, there has been maybe a couple tablespoons, or less of sediment left in the bottom. That was probably not new growth. Just some extra sediment that escaped the cold conditioning. In other words, I`m not sure how much more filtering would have helped.

I agree, that when I have had deliberately cloudy ales, it was a different experience than clear. We are so used to unfiltered wheat beers that it was a revelation the first time I had a krystalwiezen. I'm not a big fan of yeasty flavours, but it is a part of the heffe tradition. In an ale I'm not so crazy for it.

Keller beers, including one I brew can be cloudy without much yeast flavour. I think this is because these beers are stored in oak and that masks the yeast flavour. The tannins may even do something to kill off the yeast.

As a generalization, I think the filtering/non-filtering may come from how different cultures perceive beer. Many think of beer as a food product and as such, a hearty cloudy beer is probably desirable. In Europe many areas viewed beer as a beverage. Some were even brewed to compete with champagne. In this case clarity would be desirable. I would imagine once we went down the road of trying to make the lightest colour Plisners as possible, clarity would have followed. Certainly mass market beers that essentially compete with (and pretty much are) soda pop, would be filtered too.

[G.M. Gillman]

Good comments, thanks. National traditions are certainly a part of it, but I was struck how a move toward clarity seems established by the mid-1800's. I still feel, despite the theories of influence of glass vessels, or desirability of making beer more stable, that this was mostly driven by considerations of palate.

Gary

[markaberrant]

All of my homebrew is unfiltered, and unless I'm using wheat, oats or other raw grains, they come out of the keg pretty damn bright and clear.

I do agree with Gary's observation that a lot of the cask ale served in North America is indeed cloudy, I have no idea why this is, it certainly does nothing to improve its popularity in my opinion.

I do not care for cloudy beer, unless it is wheat beer. Yeast bite is a rather nasty thing. In my experience, filtering is not necessary to remove this.

[cratez]

I have no problem with a cloudy appearance so long as the yeast flavours don't dominate the beer's taste. That said most of the good beer that I drink is relatively clear and full-flavoured. If I get a cloudy cask ale that tastes like overly yeasty, amateurish homebrew, I just return it. But this rarely ever happens.

[G.M. Gillman]

Mark, do your beers drop bright on their own or do you fine them?

I agree Cratez about that amateurish taste of some cloudy real ale but (I regret to say) I've been served a lot of it!

Gary

[markaberrant]

Mark, do your beers drop bright on their own or do you fine them?

I have never fined or filtered. I typically use a dry yeast (reportedly the same as used by Sierra Nevada), takes 2 weeks at 4C, sometimes 3 weeks to drop bright. Even my extremely hoppy beers clear up, I've seen some double IPAs from other homebrewers that look like pea soup.

Many english strains will drop bright within 1 week.

[D Derry]

Mark, do you bottle condition? If so, do you have any problem, after cold conditioning, with insuffucient residual yeast in the beer to carbonate it?

[markaberrant]

Mark, do you bottle condition? If so, do you have any problem, after cold conditioning, with insuffucient residual yeast in the beer to carbonate it?

I don't bottle condition anymore, but even when I was, I would get very clear beer. Usual practice was 2 week primary (1 week to ferment, 1 week cold condition to drop yeast), then bottle. Very little sediment, never had a problem carbonating.

[D Derry]

(Sorry I know this is a bit of a sidetrack.) Really? Interesting. So you allowed all post-fermentation conditioning to take place in the bottle then, right? Did that work okay for high gravity beers? I was under the impression that imperial-types did well to have an extended secondary carboy conditioning. But this backfired recently when I bottled an imperial stout that had been in a secondary vessel for 3 months--now the stuff isn't carbonating. Big drain pour in the offing.

[markaberrant]

(Sorry I know this is a bit of a sidetrack.) Really? Interesting. So you allowed all post-fermentation conditioning to take place in the bottle then, right? Did that work okay for high gravity beers? I was under the impression that imperial-types did well to have an extended secondary carboy conditioning. But this backfired recently when I bottled an imperial stout that had been in a secondary vessel for 3 months--now the stuff isn't carbonating. Big drain pour in the offing.

I've never seen any tests or studies which prove the benefits of bulk aging vs bottle aging (or even large format vs small format bottles).

It is far more important to ferment a clean beer in the first place, as opposed to worrying about conditioning/aging. I just bottled a 10.7% imperial stout, spent 10 days in primary, followed by 3 weeks of cold conditioning/carbonating in the keg. It tastes spectacular, not a hint of alcohol heat, even when drank alongside some commercial IS that had been cellaring for 12 months.

To bring it back to the topic of clear, yet unfiltered beer - you also have to have good brewing processes; knowing your malts, using the right mash profile, and proper boiling/chilling of the wort will all affect clarity of the finished procuct.

Most commercial brewers have to use some sort of filtration, as they do not have the time to allow the beer to naturally clear, plus the public typically does not want any particulate ending up in the finished product (ie; a single hop leaf from dry hopping).

We've had similar discussions before, and I personally feel that poorly filtered beer has a certain taste and texture to it. I find it extremely noticable in hop forward beers that should have a certain aroma and mouthfeel profile from the fresh hop oils, but some of this is stripped away by the filtering. Centrifuge is the only filtering method that does not exhibit this in my opinion, but is also extremely expensive.

[G.M. Gillman]

I am not a brewer, but I wonder if that Imperial Stout which is non-conditioning just needs more time, perhaps even 6-12 months. I believe it would develop likely a superb small bubble carbonation by then, possibly (or in part) through subsequent action by Brett.

Gary

[D Derry]

I hope you're right, Gary. No harm in letting it sit around in order to find out, so maybe that's what I will do. In the meantime I'm going to be rethinking my approach to conditioning, in part because it's much harder to minimize empty headspace in carboys vs bottles. That and all the chill haze is getting on my nerves.

[markaberrant]

Centrifuge is the only filtering method that does not exhibit this in my opinion, but is also extremely expensive.

When I say extremely expensive, the centrifuge at Odell in Fort Collins, CO cost $250k according to the guy that gave me a private tour in Feb. Their hoppy beers taste fantastic though, and the shelf stability has further improved.

[Steve Beaumont]

A few thoughts on filtration/haze/etc.

1. IMO, German kellerbier (aka ungespundet, zwickel, etc.) works better than yeasty, dry-bodied ales because lagers take to sulphur better than do ales;
2. Sweet-bodied ales, on the other hand, are still able to take a bit of yeasty bite because they have that malty sweetness to offset the tang;
3) Ditto well-hopped ales, the bitterness of which again hides, or at least subdues, the tang;
4) Bitters and best bitters are best served clear because they don't have either the hoppiness or the sweetness to cover the flavour of the yeast, again IMO;
5) Cloudy cask ales in North America are, I suspect, more about cellarmanship than they are about the beer itself;
6) The different family of yeasts used in weissbiers harmonizes well with the beer, which is why IMO kristal weizens seem to be missing something.

Sorry, that was more than I meant to post. One thing just wound up leading to another.

A final point. It may surprise some to know that most of the well-known and widely distributed Belgian and Belgian style wheat beers are actually centrifuged or otherwise treated to remove the majority of the yeast. The cloudiness is mostly just chill haze resulting from the use of unmalted wheat.