Treat your beer like Champagne.
What on earth am I talking about? Well I was reading on the internet about how champagne is made and how the champagne is allowed to ferment in the bottle, then how the champagne is cleared afterwards. The problem I find with bottling beer when you come to pour the beer, you look at the bottle, hold it up to the light marvelling at the beer you have created, how clear it is and how wonderful it looks. You then decant the beer into you favourite pint pot and you serve a cloudy beer one which in the pub you would critise the landlord for not keeping his beer nice.
The problem being of course is when you poured the beer you stirred up all the yeast in the bottom of the bottle and clouded your beer. Now you can’t get away from having the yeast in the beer when it goes into the bottle after all this is what primes your beer. What you need is a way to get the yeast out the bottle without losing the fizz.
This is where the champagne comes in, when champagne is made the white wine is bottled before it has finished fermenting, just like your beer. The wine continues to ferment in the bottle, which produces the carbon dioxide and the sparkle. Unfortunately champagne suffers the same yeast problem as the beer.
Champagne goes through a process of ‘riddling’ and ‘disgorging’ which leave a crystal clear bottle of champagne. Riddling is a process where the bottles of champagne are slowly turned over, this takes a couple of weeks. This allows all the yeast to settle in the neck of the bottle. The champagne is then suspended into freezing cold anti freeze, this forms a plug of ice in the neck of the bottle. In this plug of ice is the yeast.
The bottle top is then removed, the pressure in the bottle then blasts the ice plug yeast and all out of the bottle. This is known as ‘disgorging’. You then need to be quick in getting your thumb over the end of the bottle. The bottle is then topped up with the a little sparkling wine from another bottle and recorked. Et Voila a clear bottle of champagne.
Now without a vat of freezing cold anti freeze, things need to be a little different for beer. I have just tried this method and it seems to work so far. You bottle the beer as normal and allow it to prime as normal, but you turn the bottle upside down and allow the beer to clear. The yeast will again be trapped in the cap of the bottle. Similar to riddling but a tad quicker.
Then put the entire bottle in the freezer upside down, be careful in moving the beer as you don’t want to stir up the yeast. Now you need to leave it in the freezer long enough that the beer in the neck is frozen. If you have filled the bottle fully then you may have a problem if you fully allow the beer to freeze. The expanding ice can blow the top off, I found about 24hours in the freezer was enough to allow the yeasty ice to be scraped out.
Once frozen unscrew the cap and scrape the yeast from the bottle neck. I washed the neck of the bottle to make sure all the yeast is out. Screw the cap back on and leave to defrost, in theory you have clear beer that can be poured straight from the bottle with no fear of a cloudy pint. As the carbon dioxide is dissolved in the beer, when you freeze it the carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ice, the bottle will repressurise as soon as the ice melts.
[tags]homemade beer, homebrew recipe, homebrew beer, making beer [/tags]
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