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I've moved into all-grain brewing to make a mash. I've adapted a rye beer recipe, leaving out the malt extract and just using malted and rolled (flaked) rye, rice hulls. Did all the rests and used my priming bucket with a grease strainer as the false bottom for a tun. Sparged by putting the grains in a brew bag and pouring 1870F water over the grains and collected wort into carboy. The collected mash has no grains but is very cloudy, even though I followed procedures to get the high temp and cold trub separated (skimmed the high and transferred down to the cold when racking). Tried the egg white method to clarify, not much happening. Since it is too late to use irish moss, any suggestions for post-fermentation clarification?

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I imagine most of the cloudiness is possibly from flour or tannins. The flour usually falls out during the boil, but will fall out in the fermentor also. Tannins form tannin-protein complexes which cause a permanent haze.

If the haze is caused by flour particles, then you can just leave the beer - flour particles are large and they will fall out in a few days. If the beer doesn't clear naturally after a week, then it's probably a permanent haze from the tannins.

To fix this, you can use either gelatin or isinglass. Both contain collagen, which is positively charged. Tannins are also positively charged, but attract proteins, which are negatively charged. The collagen binds to the negative protein, and drags the tannin-protein haze out of the beer. It works well.

If you're not already doing it, when mashing, you can clear the wort of flour by vorlaufing the runoff - draining the wort and quietly adding it back to the mash and repeating until the mash runs fairly clear. The grain bed acts as a filter and filters out most of the flour. If you didn't do this, then the mash can be cloudy, and this can make it's way into the fermenter. At the end of boiling, if you leave the kettle for 20 mins, most of the flour (usually covered in lots of protein break) will also fall out and not make it into the fermentor.

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  • How do you get flour in your wort?
    – Denny Conn
    Commented Feb 10, 2012 at 16:39
  • There's always flour present when crushing grain. Normally the vorlauf takes care of it, but the OP didn't mention that he did that, so that could be a cause of cloudiness. Must admit, I have a hard time believing that this made it to the fermentor, but guess it's possible. It's more likely the tannins causing permanent haze, or perhaps unconverted starch.
    – mdma
    Commented Feb 10, 2012 at 16:43
  • Hey Denny, just found a reference to your sparging page at dennybrew. Didn't realize I had been communicating with a brewmeister :-) all this time.
    – drj
    Commented Feb 14, 2012 at 21:56

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