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Email Required, but never shown. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Related Hot Network Questions. Would you believe the answer to all your clarity problems is seaweed?
Okay maybe I got a little ahead of myself there, but the simplest answer to all your homebrew clarity questions is Irish Moss. What is Irish Moss?
Well as you have already guessed, it is not a special type of moss that grows in Ireland. It is in fact a readily harvested blend of seaweed. Knowing what Irish Moss does is perhaps a much bigger question than just what is Irish Moss. To answer that question, and to single handily solve your beer clarity crisis, we have to have a simple chemistry lesson.
Essentially, we need to know what it is that makes your homemade beer cloudy to start with. There are basically three main sources to cloudiness in beer. Help Support Homebrew Talk:. IPYay Member. Joined Mar 5, Messages 11 Reaction score 0 Location san francisco. I was in my local homebrew shop the other day and I mentioned to ye olde master brewer that I always add irish moss as a clarifying agent.
He laughed and said that irish moss doesn't actually do anything. I'm inclined to believe him, since he's pretty well-respected, but I wondered what you veterans have to say about this. Any scientists out there that beg to differ?
What's the word on this? Good fermentations, IPYay. I'm by far a veteran but I can tell you that when I add 1 tsp of Irish Moss in 5 gallons, I can watch my beer clear in the sight tube. The wort goes form hazy to clear with coagulated break in the last 15 minutes.
I use a tbsp per 5 G boil. If I had more spare cash I'd try filtering too but I'm a bit hesitant because I like to dry hop and am afraid I'll filter out my flavor. Listened to a basic brewing podcast the other day regarding this very issue.
Several brewers brewed different batches of beer, both extract and all grain. For the most part, dis not have much of an effect on extract brews. There was a slight increase in clarity on a few of the all grains. It was a good episode.
If you haven't listened to it before, check out basic brewing radio. I use it because I have it on hand but I don't notice any difference between when I use it and when I don't. If there is a difference in the final product I am guessing it is pretty small. Apparently it is oppositley charged to the protien floaters in the wort.
It will coagulate everything so it will settle out to the bottom. I can definitely see it work when I toss it in the last 15 mins. If anything it separates more trub at the end of the boil on the way to the primary. Shinglejohn Well-Known Member. I notice it in the fermentor, the break material is noticeably in large chunks. I use for all my beers, why not. Its super cheap. Even if the effect is minimal, it seems worth it. JonM Well-Known Member. And what about the results of the trub xBmt where more kettle trub in the fermentor produced the clearer beer?
A majority of the Irish moss plant consists of carrageenan, which is key to clarify beer during the boil. Carrageenan has a negative electrostatic charge. Because of the attraction between proteins and carrageenan, larger clumps of hot break material form, making them more likely to precipitate out of suspension in a faster manner.
Ultimately the clumps will not make it into the fermenter. The sole purpose of Irish moss is to make it easier to rack clearer wort to the fermentor, which presumably leads to brighter beer based on the axiom, clear wort leads to clear beer. I am certainly not the first to experiment with Irish Moss. However, the results of listeners who performed their own experiments were more mixed, with some going as far to say Irish moss is a waste of money.
Additional research led me mostly to concerns about the flavor impact of using too much Irish moss and speculation that its use reduces head formation and retention. Agog was I! To investigate the differences between a beer fined with Irish moss and one that was not. I also happened have a couple fresh sachets lying around that I wanted to use up.
Since manipulation of the independent variable in this xBmt would occur during the boil, I thought it might be fun to try a novel to me approach when it came to brewing this beer— rather than perform separate mashes, I would mash a single batch then split the resultant wort into 2 kettles. Utilizing the batch sparge method , I got to mashing. I stirred the single volume of sweet wort for approximately 5 minutes to ensure complete homogenization of the first and second runnings, after which I collected half and added it to my other brew kettle.
I checked the SG of each wort 3 times to make they were the same, which they were. The boil proceeded as usual with hops being added at their scheduled times. I used my precision blade scale to weigh out 5 grams of Irish moss, which is equivalent to approximately 1 tsp, the recommended amount for a typical 5 gallon batch of homebrew. The Irish moss was then added to one kettle with 10 minutes left in the boil, while the other kettle received none.
Rather than immediately move the fermentors into the temp controlled chamber as I usually do at this point, I set a timer for 10 minutes to intermittently document any observed differences. I always trusted Irish moss had some sort of coagulative effect, but honestly, the differences I observed surprised the hell out of me.
After pitching yeast and moving the carboys to the ferm chamber, I collected some of the leftover wort in hydrometer flasks and let them sit out while I finished cleaning up. As predicted, the Irish moss batch was noticeably clearer with a much thicker trub layer than the non-fined sample.
I came back a day later to discover a fairly drastic difference in the way each krausen looked, with the Irish moss batch much more recognizable than the other. The brownish layer on the non-fined batch persisted for about 1 more day, after which both beers took on a very similar appearance.
Left: Irish moss 1. I let them hangout in the warm chamber for a few more days, both ultimately finishing at 1. Click pic for my review of the Sterile Siphon Starter. After a few days in the keezer , they were ready to be served and I was awkwardly excited to observe the changes in clarity that might occur over the time they remained on tap.
What follows is a temporal look at the beers over a course of about 5 weeks, the one fined with Irish moss is on the left in each one. You may have noticed slightly less haze in the Irish moss beer starting at about week 3, though to be fair, it took a lot of finagling to get the proper lighting and angle to achieve these results.
The only consistent difference I noticed in appearance, starting from that first pour, was the head retention. I decided to give these beers more conditioning time than I usually do before presenting them to the tasting panel, spending 4 weeks in my keezer before data collection began. I was invited to chat with James Spencer about this xBmt on an episode of the fantastic Basic Brewing Radio podcast, it was a great time. Cheers to Olan from HomeBrewDad. I convinced a total of 15 people to participate in this xBmt, each was served 1 sample of the Irish moss fined beer and 2 samples of non-fined beer in different colored opaque cups then instructed to identify the unique sample.
The only 2 participants who perceived the appearance to be different were James and Steve from Basic Brewing Radio, both endorsing the beer fined with Irish moss as having better appearance. But even James admitted they almost missed it. Initially, this made me wonder if perhaps some of the blind participants simply paid less attention to appearance than the others.
If this were the case, and given the fact significance was nearly reached, one might assume some other factor contributed to the perceived difference between the 2 beers.
When it comes to aroma, 3 and 5 of the participants said the beers were not at all and somewhat similar, respectively. Every person who correctly chose the different beer during the triangle test experienced the 2 different beers as being aromatically distinct. In terms of preference, it was split down the middle, with 4 each preferring the Irish moss and the non-fined sample. Ratings on flavor similarity were slightly different with 6 tasters perceiving the 2 samples as tasting only somewhat similar while the other 2 perceived them to be not at all similar.
Furthermore, 5 preferred the flavor of the non-fined beer, while the other 3 thought the Irish moss batch tasted better. Still, no one perceived them as being the same. Regarding mouthfeel, 5 thought they were somewhat similar, 2 reported them as being exactly the same , and only 1 perceived them as being not at all similar. When asked which beer was preferred overall, a small majority 5 selected the beer that was not fined with Irish moss.
Toward the end of the survey, participants who accurately chose the different beer in the triangle test were informed of the nature of the xBmt and asked to pick the beer they thought was fined with Irish moss. I was certain at this point, the beers slightly warmer and each person knowing the variable being tested, everyone would be able to pick the correct beer. Again, I was wrong— 3 people incorrectly chose the non-fined beer. My impressions on what I observed in terms of clarity are best summed in the photos above— the Irish moss beer was clearer than the non-fined batch, though not by much.
From a strictly statistical standpoint, these xBmt results suggest Irish moss does not significantly impact beer.
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