How to Filter Your Homemade Beer

Properly filtering your beer is a huge part of the home brewing process and filtering should take place at many different stages during the brewing and fermenting process. If the wort is not properly filtered, left over hops can have an extended bittering effect on the beer and excess grain and hops sediment can potentially impact fermentation. Luckily, filtering takes little to no time and can be done with equipment you likely already own.

Things You'll Need

• Fermentation bucket
• Kitchen strainer
• Ladle
• Siphon
• Carboy
• Sanitizer

Instructions

Filtering Homebrew

1. Sanitize everything that will come into contact with your beer. Bacterial infection will skunk your beer and destroy all your hard work.

2. Pour the wort (the unfermented beer) through a large, fine mesh kitchen strainer as you pour it from the brew pot to the primary fermentation bucket. Go slow, as hops residue will build up quickly and clog your strainer. It will most likely be necessary to clean out the strainer several times.

3. After primary fermentation has stopped, you'll need to filter the beer again as you transfer it to your secondary fermentation carboy. Use a filtered siphon tool to do this. The act of fermentation will create a great deal of sediment at the bottom of the primary fermenting bucket that you want to keep out of the secondary carboy.

4. Filter the beer again during the bottling process. Use the filtered siphoning tool again as you transfer the beer from the carboy into the bucket with the priming sugar. This will remove the last bit of yeast sediment from the beer right before you bottle it.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't worry if you don't get all the little particles floating around in your beer. Some of the best beers in the world still have yeast sediment in the bottles.

• At all times, remember to relax. It's just beer.

References

• The Complete Joy of Homebrewing