FISH IN MY PINT?!?!?

Sorry, but there are brewers using seaweed for fining. Like I said though - it's crap.

There is one : dropping bright by keeping the beer at 2°C for a few days, but it's not really applicable to cask ale...

As to the "chemical" alternatives to isinglass, they're basically plastic powders with an electrostatic charge (akin to that respect to copier toner).

BTW the wine industry in principle has the same problem...

Yeah, as a cask fining, it's crap, just like isinglass would be crap as a kettle fining, therefore it's not interchangeable with isinglass.

In article , KeithS writes

Yeah. The active principle (to use a rather alchemical term) of Irish moss is carrageenan - a polymer made up of sulphated sugar units, so it's basically a long-chain molecule with loads of negative charge distributed down it. Isinglass has, if I remember rightly, lots of positively charged regions, so carrageenan and isinglass take out differently charged gunk (and to make things worse, if you add them simultaneously, they'll take out each other).

There was research going on back in the late eighties on polysaccharides with a net positive charge that could do the same job as isinglass, but I've not been a carbohydrate chemist for over a decade now, and am somewhat out of touch....

Steve

In article , Brett... writes

Clears things up nicely....

Steve

It is not unknown for a brewery to forget to add them.

I heard of a brewery that was inadvertently spoiling their beer by adding infected finings to it.

Quite a famous brewery.

In Manchester.

Robin

there is a seaweed-based cask fining product - known as auxiliary finings, but it is supposed only to sort out protein haze, not yeast.

I do have some experience of brewing & serving (fairly) clear unisinglassed beer.

for brakspear's ted&ben's organic ale we simply rough filtered the yeast out & then re-seeded with a low yeast count, which seemed to settle out in cask (or was so low as not to notice in suspension)

at zerodegs we used cold temps (in cylindro-conical FV & horizontal serving tank) to clear the beers, this often left the pilsner with a slight chill-haze (protein) but no yeast-bite flavours in any of the beers IMO.

Oddly, the Belgie & Kraut-style wheat beers didn't come clear (what we hoped - I presume the yeasts were non-flocculent) tho the US style (75% wheatmalt) wheat beer did!? (we used an ordinary flocculent ale yeast, but I thought we would still have had clarity probs w all that wheat).

obviously lengthy cold-conditioning will prob round off the fruitier edges of some ales, so isn't perhaps ideal, but the system suited me fine.

A friend who went to Marble (Manchester) when they had first turned veggie said the beers were largely cloudy & beer flavour was heavily masked by the taste of so much yeast.

anyone been recently & care to comment on clarity & flavour?

Chris Ramsbottom/Pandora wrote

hmmm, very odd, I've never heard of any commercial breweries knowingly using anything other than isinglass (& the 'forementioned auxiliary finings) to cask-fine their beers.

I've also been round Murphy's plant in Nottingham a few years back where they explained the 'cutting' process (of breaking the bladders down into an acid suspension) & that sturgeon's were seldom used now (over-fished?) but that other varieties of fish had suitable swim-bladders.

There's an excellent article by Murphy's Ray Alton on the principles of fining on Murphy's site - - follow links for "Products", "Finings" & then "It'll be all bright on the night"

presumably if the replacement was veggie/vegan then brewers & finings producers would be singing about it a bit more, no?

Simon wrote

abso-bloomin-lutely!

Robin Cox wrote

I've heard of a brewery doing this too, but can't remember which one (& Manchester doesn't spring to mind) IIRC they were leaving uncollected spent grains to go off right next to the open finings tank.

the homebrew website someone mentioned earlier had a piece about PVPP (aka PolyClar or poly-vinyl-poly-pyrrolidone - Nylon-derived, so presumably petroleum-based? & OK for veggies?) which said it can be very successful in clearing yeast, but so much so that it can cause

I / mikemcg wrote

knowingly

then here I found this - "there is now a synthetic version of isinglass which is vegan."

whether this product behaves exactly as isinglass I don't know (i.e. re-fines beer several times, not just once).

I would ask the same question about 'PVPP'.

MikeMcG

Greetings all, I would have replied earlier, but have been on my travels ( Brandywine Brewing co Delaware, Gaslight brewery, Ship brewery, Brooklyn Brewery etc NJ). Basically 99% of breweries making cask ale use isinglass. There have been various bits of oddity from the EU about labelling the fish bit, but there is no evidence that it really is an allergen ( the wine and beer industries worldwide have recently been in a flap over disclosure) and the debates about disclosure etc came up with one astounding answer (worlwide) i.e. there is no real practical alternative to fish based/derived isinglass other than long lagering or some very specific yeasts. The vegetarian alternatives are not really that good, or many of us would switch because the oceans of the world are exploited enough as it is, but if all the clever peeps in the worldwide beer and wine industry can't come up with a solution, then isinglass is where we stay for now. Many do not label as "fish" but just list "isinglass" knowing that not alot of people know that "Isinglass" is really fish derived (although highly processed as it doesn't cause a reaction in fish allergics) The COOP label to a very high degree of safety and honesty margin, hence the label info.. A synthetic version would have advantages because of greater consistancy / easier assay etc, but sorry folks - there really isn't one. Don.

Did you get as far as Dogfish Head? (brewpub/microdistillery(!) in Rehoboth & micro in Milton, Delaware?)

re Isinglass in bottled beer production - I thought in your case Marston's would have cold-conditioned & sterile-filtered before re-seeding with a little clean yeast, so would you necessarily need to fine with isinglass in tank?

unless of course you mean that you use isinglass in the bottle itself? But AFAIK most breweries don't, as the yeast seems to pack down better on its own.

For cask beer I reckon the following might work - cold-sedimentation in tank (& re-seeding if necessary) but keeping a low yeast count in the cask - i.e. enough for cask-conditioning to take place, but low enough to settle out in time in pub cellar (or not be very visible or yeast-bitten if some is left in suspension).

I don't *know* if this would work, but I'd like to try it out. cheers MikeMcG

There is a coincidence I've just finished writing a review of Gold Miner for the Worcestershire County Pub newsletter.

Thousands of vegans seem to be surviving.

Maybe because its simply not true for proteins. Its on the same level of ignorance as claiming fish is a vegetarian food.

There are certain vitamins and minerals that are hard to obtain from plant sources which is why *vegans* often take artificial supplements. Vegetarians don't usually have that problem...

Just.

Surviving, yes...

And, actually it's some amino acids that are not abundant in plants, so they have to be taken as supplements.

Seems a bit like a druggies existence to me.

Allan Bennett Not a fan of restricted diets

In message , Steven Pampling writes

You really didn't put much thought into how badly this was going to screw your credibility did you?

You post obvious BS about vegetarians, why the hell should anyone take the other bollocks you claim seriously?

I have credibility? coo. Oh, and try checking on the health stats for vegans. Plenty of admissions for treatment due to malnutrition. It's possible to survive, it's not a healthy practice. The human body developed as an omnivore, ignore at your peril.

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