Finings

[Chris]

Hi

I visited a small brewery when on a recent trip to the UK and they mentioned using Isinglass Finings to speed up time from fermenting to drinking.

I just wondered how I would go about using it for my homebrew method?

Currently I rack off to a secondary fermenter after primary fermentation has finished, then batch prime before bottling.

I figure I would add Isinglass to the secondary fermenter but am not sure when? Also, from what I understand, Isinglass kills off the yeast, so surely this would make priming before bottling a waste of time and thus produce flat beer? How do I get round this issue?

Many thanks
Chris

[Adam]

You can bottle condition after using isinglass. All it does is drop out yeast and tannins faster (not all of it), what yeast do you use? I have had good experiences with the magnifine 300 from cryer malt but i chill to 0 then add isinglass which i have prepared earlier. At the moment i dont bother with it and use regular gelatine to fine in my kegs and im very impressed. 2 week old beer thats crystal clear using wlp001. Ive heard that gelatine can strip to much yeast for botlle conditioning though.

[Chris]

Hi Adam.

I've been using Safale US-05 and Saflager S-23 yeast.

If bottle conditioning will still work after adding isinglass then I'll give it a try, what's to lose! Will be interesting to see if it speeds up conditioning and gets rid of that 'yeasty' taste quicker.

Many thanks for your help.

[denimglen]

What I usually do is just cold crash it in the fridge for 24hours to a week. Damn near crystal clear after that.

Although it depends on how much fridge space you have and I keg so I don't know if the yeast survive the cold, I'd say they would though.

[Chris]

Cold crashing isn't really an option at the moment as I just don't have the fridge space. Am going to keep an eye out for a s/h fridge for using over the summer though so will keep that in mind for a future experiment.

Does anyone know the right time to add Isinglass?