Bringing Clarity to Beer

When a beer finishes the fermentation process, it goes through a crash. Dropping the temperature and letting the beer settle. Yeast and residuals drop to the bottom of the fermenter. This leads to the product being ready to finish for drinking.

At Edison, we filter our beer for clarity. Depending on the beer style, we adjust the amount of filtering. Some beers like Hefeweizens, we go lighter on the filter so we can keep some cloudiness. If you see a German Hefeweizen labeled Kristall, as in clear, it is filtered. At Edison, our current Hilda is more of a Kristall, We will continue to adjust this as we like to have more of the cloudiness as each batch comes out till we find the right balance.

Small tidbit, when leading up to open during the pandemic, one equipment item we had trouble getting was our plate filter. It is from Italy and we had to wait on brewing beer as this and a few other parts were in limbo.

Our new beer, Edison Light, a Kolsch style beer will be very clear so full row of filter plates being used.

Hoses on the output of the fermenter connect to through a pump to the filter. If we served the beer without filtering, there would be a bit of a haze from suspended particles that did not settle. Many breweries choose not to go through this process and it is ok. Beer is unique to the brewery and taste profiles comes from each step in the process.

Not a lot of action during this process since it is a closed system and you can only see the output beer as it goes through the sight glass. This beer is still cold so you can see condensation on the glass.

In this case, we are pumping the beer directly to a Serving tank. Other times will will push to a Bright tank. These two tanks are the same. Only difference, is the Serving tank has a line directly to a tap at the bar. The Bright is like a holding tank.

Now that the Serving tank is filled, we open the tap and pour our first glass of Edison Light. You can see how bright and clean this beer looks.

Next time you are in, we hope you enjoy the flavor of our beers and know that we take time and care to brew true to tradition styles of beer.

Come join one of our Brewery tours to learn more. https://www.drinkedison.com/tickets

Prost!