Filtering the German Altbier

After two weeks of fermentation at 60 F and two weeks of lagering at about 55 F I got to filtering the German Alt I brewed in January. I decided to put it on tap a little bit earlier than I had previously planned since I'm looking for another beer to put on tap along with the English Oatmeal Stout that'll be on tap soon. I'll have plenty of beers ready to go on tap after the Alt's finished, and I figured a month should be enough age on a beer like this. Plus, additional maturation will occur once the beer's in the kegerator.

Alt flowing through the filter cartridge

I knew I'd have to filter this beer, since even with a long lagering period, the Wyeast 2565 Kolsch yeast is a poor floculator. I cold crashed the beer last night at around 38 F to help some of the yeast fall to the bottom of the keg, helping the filtration process. All that was needed was one pass through the coarse filter and the beer came out crystal clear on the other end. There doesn't seem to be a lot of protein haze or any other haze to the beer, so I'm thinking my process of chilling the beer to 60 F after the boil (rather than just around 70  F) and using a larger amount of irish moss could be helping to produce clearer beers.

The filtered Alt flowing into the right keg

Although the beer was not yet carbonated and a bit too cold, the first taste was fantastic; super malty with a great clean taste and finish. Once it's all carbonated, it should be a great malty brown ale.

The Belgian Dubbel should be ready this weekend as well. I've already gone through about a gallon's worth of the beer in bottles, trying 12 oz. bottles of the dubbel every few days to check how carbonation is proceeding. The Oatmeal Stout will be cold crashed and force carbonated this weekend as well, possibly after only coarse filtration as with the Alt. 

The English Pale and the "laurabelle" English Barleywine are now both roughly a week and a half old. The English Pale has been finished for a while, but I had to leave it on the yeast to allow the beer to clean up after a very fast fermentation. I should have a free keg to put it in by the weekend too, after the Oatmeal Stout has been filtered. The English Barleywine is slowly, slowly still chugging along, although visual signals of fermentation are almost all but gone. With past high gravity brews, I would have likely concluded that the beer had finished by now, and even bottled the beer, resulting in "gushers" or exploding bottles. Now that I know better, I'll be transferring the beer into a secondary carboy to finish a long conditioning period of anywhere from 1 to 2 months before bottling and allowing for years of bottle conditioning.