Minijet pump

[Gil Breau]

Wife's got one of these....well...Mom-in-law owns it, but we pilfered it.

Noticed quite a few homebrew shops online selling it to filter beer. Would this work as well or better instead of say, gelatin, to clear beers up?


Seen her use it on wine, makes it look nice for sure.

[Dave Savoie]

Honestly if you use gelatin then cold crash it does just a good a job as the filter wine tends to be cleaner due to the sheer amount of time you let it set than beer the filters will get very clogged one would think

[Richard]

Related thread: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=151&p=1053

Personally I suspect it would have to be filtered on the way into the fermenter (cold), at the point when oxidation isn't an issue. Since it's a wine filter it probably doesn't give a hoot about introducing oxidation.

Dave: I could use getting mine back at some point to filter some mead I've got planned

[Dave Savoie]

Im gonna try to come up to fredericton on 23rd i think Ill bring it up then I have some filters for it also

[Gil Breau]

Here: http://www.brewinginformation.com/filtering-beer.htm

And here:
[youtube:3r5z0cvu]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNrFj0Am92U[/youtube:3r5z0cvu]

Only works if you keg and force carb. Bottling, its useless. And you need an O2 purged container.

Apparently if you can purge the canister so theres no O2, it should be fine. They do it by stopping up a secondary carboy and forcing it in that way......I know an easier way just by looking at the setup.

1) Clean, Sanitze your keg. Put the lid on it.

2) Purge keg with CO2, small pressure (5psi). Let stand for a few minutes, allowing CO2 to settle at the bottom. Bleed out the top pressure relief, purging the top air level.

3) Attach Minijet to a line out QD. Attach to the line out, so the beer is flowing directly to the bottom, never contacting the air, only the CO2 layer at the bottom (and that's only initially).

4) Start Pump and voila.

Only Con: No Idea how much is in the keg until it overflows..... only solution I can think of is to open the keg halfway through to keep an eye on it.

[Richard]

Yeah just make sure you're using it right or you'll end up with a water feature in your kitchen.. eh dave

[Dave Savoie]

lol wine shower !!!!!!

[Richard]

"uhh... is it supposed to do that?"

"probably, why else does it have a drip tray"

"just hook up another bottle to the drip tray. It'll be fine."

[Kyle]

whirlfloc (irish moss) in the boil, 3 weeks in primary, and for really light stuff, you could add a fining agent, but really not needed for near-clear beer. Filtering is expensive, messy, time consuming, and strips aromas. I personally used a cartridge filter for a while, but it was a waste of time.

[Richard]

Yeah I'm more concerned with removing crud before primary these days. If I want to bottle early I'll use gelatin, but only in a pinch 'cause of the aroma-strip.

My current "cunning plan" is to find some way of dry-hopping with pellets without letting them get into the beer itself. I was pondering a pump-forced hop-back-type gizmo to be used when transferring to the bottling bucket (or keg). Will likely macguyver something using the minijet pump and whatever's on hand at the time to see what the potential for such an idea is.

Edit: I'm really pushing my primary/secondary times these days... pitching a shitload (albeit measured quantity) of yeast seems to avoid off-flavours. I've got it as low as 2 weeks including bottle priming (2-3 days in a high - i.e. 30C+ - temperature) for 6.5%, but that's with temperature-based shenannigans (you say "conditioning and diacetyl rest", I say "2 days in my 35C kitchen"), and the beer is still getting better for two weeks after that.

Case in point, I served the first hoppy porter to you guys after one day bottle-conditioning, and about two weeks from pitching. It was carbed (thank temperature + mega-pitching), and people thought it was tasteh  

[Dean]

"my 35C kitchen"

ummmmm, you're going to have that sorted by Saturday, right??

LOL!

[Richard]

Kitchen is the exception - rest of the flat is about 21C

[Dean]

let me guess ...kitchen faces south?  can we sit outside on Saturday or does the neighbor get all pissy? from what I recall it's a shared deck ...

[Richard]

Suspect that'll be fine... Kitchen faces north, but the air-conditioning and ambient temperature outside are making that irrelevant lately.