Lowering Gluten and Chill Haze with White Labs Clarity Ferm

Recently, I brewed a Belgian Tripel. I was very careful during the brewing process to chill the beer as quickly as possible using my stainless steel wort chiller and cold/ice water. The chill process did take much longer than usual (approximately an hour) but was as fast as I could make it. When I've taken samples of the beer to measure its gravity, the samples have been unusually cloudy. This is decreasing over time, but slowly.

I read about White Labs Clarity Ferm and decided it was worth a shot. I should note that this enzyme is supposed to be added at the same time yeast is pitched, not at the 3.5-week fermentation and conditioning mark where I'll be using it. Still, there is evidence to suggest that it will help clarify the beer even when used in a less-than-optimal manner.

Chris Colby of the Beer and Wine Journal site did an experiment with Clarity Ferm in 2014, using the manufacturer's directions. He brewed multiple 5-gallon batches of the same two beers, then separated them into one-gallon batches. One of these was left untreated. The rest were treated with different levels of Clarity Ferm.

Once the beers completed fermentation, some of the samples were primed and carbonated, and others were tested without carbonation. Laboratory equipment was used to measure gluten (protein) levels in the beer. The results were interesting.

The gluten (protein) content in the treated samples was reduced to well below the 20ppm reading that characterizes "gluten free" beer. In fact, most showed virtually no detectable levels of gluten.
Gluten levels dropped from 20-40ppm in the first few days of fermentation to virtually zero by the tenth day of treatment with Clarity Ferm. The untreated beers had measurable levels of gluten even at 28 days from brewing.

If you're gluten-sensitive and enjoy beer, Clarity Ferm may be a way to enjoy your favorite beverage without the discomfort associated with gluten.

You're probably wondering, as I was, whether Clarity Ferm interfered with the taste of the beer. Here are the results from Colby's taste tests:

The Cream Ale was tested by 8 or more people, including a Basic Brewing Radio panel. Some tasters noticed a difference in the beers treated with high levels of Clarity Ferm, but the differences were mostly in mouthfeel. All the samples reportedly tasted good.
The Stout was tested by two different groups. The first were four people who used BJCP guidelines to rate the beer. Three of the four rated the treated beer in first place and another treated beer ranked second place.
A second tasting was done with nine people who had no sensory evaluation training. They were asked to identify the "different" beer (i.e., the treated one) without being told what was different. Only 2 out of the 9 correctly identified the treated beer.

In other words, apart from a possible difference in mouthfeel, it appears to be almost impossible to distinguish a Clarity Ferm treated beer from an untreated one.

Yellow Label Angel Yeast vs. Typical Brewing Yeast

I currently have my second batch of rice wine fermenting with the "magical" yellow-label Angel Yeast from China, and wanted to share some of the more unusual aspects of using it. If you've never seen or used this yeast, I suspect you're not alone. It ships in a 500 gram package that looks like this: What makes it "yellow label" is that yellow box you see in the upper left corner of the package. This implies that it's yeast for distilling (though you do not need to have a still or distill the output to use it). As I understand it, inside the package is a mix of yeast and other materials which will convert starch into sugar and directly ferment it, without the need for a traditional mash step. This can radically shorten your brewing time. For my most-recent batch of rice wine, I heated 3 gallons of water to 155F, poured it over 13+ pounds of uncooked rice straight out of the bag, let that soak for an hour, rehydrated some of this yeast in warm water,

2021 Batch 1 - Rice Wine made with Yellow Label Angel Yeast

I've become a big fan of the Still It channel on YouTube. About a month ago, Jesse posted a video about how he made rice wine using nothing more than water, rice, and a purported "magic" yeast from China called Yellow Label Angel Yeast. Perhaps even more amazing was the fact that he was able to make the rice wine without gelatinizing or mashing the rice. He shows three batches in the video. One was made by cooking the rice before adding the yeast mixture. Another was made by adding uncooked rice to boiling water. The last was made by adding uncooked rice to room temperature water. All three fermented out to roughly the same amount of alcohol in about two weeks. He was amazed by this, as was I. I resolved to buy some of this magical yeast from Aliexpress.com and try it out. In the Still It video, the rice is ground up in the grain mill into smaller chunks to make it easier for the enzymes in the yellow label yeast to convert and ferment. I'm changing this up s

Making Alton Brown's Immersion Cooker Fennel Cardamon Cordial

Alton Brown's "Good Eats" series is my favorite cooking show. I love the way he explains the "why" and "how" of a recipe in detail, which helps you understand (if things don't go right) where you may have gone wrong. In his episode on immersion cooking (also known as sous vide), he shows you how to make a cordial in an hour using an immersion cooker. It took me a while to locate all the ingredients here in Columbus. I ended up getting the fennel and vodka at Giant Eagle. The cardamom seeds, pods, and anise stars came from Amazon. The Fennel fronds and bulb came from Trader Joe's at Easton. Ingredients 32 ounces of 80-proof vodka 2 cups of fennel fronds 10 green cardamom pods 3 ounces granulated sugar 1 tablespoon fennel seeds 1 teaspoon black cardamom seeds 1 whole star anise Begin by loading your sous vide vessel with hot water and set your immersion cooker to 140F. While the cooker is getting up to that temperature, meas

Begin Brewing!

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