I use both Biofine and PVPP regularly and don't notice much stripping of hop flavor. What ever you do do not use sparkalloid, as that shit will strip everything out of your beer. Biofine is particularly good for forcing yeast to flocculate, whereas PVPP will clear chill haze (it needs to be present though, and cold) more effectively. You can actually buy them as a combination solution as well.
Peter, is there a specific reason why you are adding biofine to your homebrewing practice? I am assuming that if an individual uses biofine in their beer that you then have to keg that beer (will there be enough yeast left for bottle conditioning?). Cheers!
There's enough left for bottle conditioning as long as the beer is not a monster, 11%+. I accidentally added biofine to the wrong fermenter of milk stout (I had 4 of them going) and was still able to bottle condition with no added yeast, it just took a little longer.
Hi Jack, The decision to add Biofine was sort of random. I may not do it at all and doubt that it will ever become a regular part of my homebrew process. I have a bottle that I got when I was brewing with a lot of raw grains last summer. I thought I would have the opportunity to share those beers and enter them into a local competition. While normally I am not overly mindful of cosmetic issues in my beer, when sharing and competing, I would like my beers to be brilliant. And I forgot to use the Biofine. And I didn't enter the comp. And I didn't share my beer I forgot I had the Biofine until two weeks ago, when a pre-brewing inventory check reminded me. I will be dry hopping and kegging an IPA and kegging a saison tomorrow, so there is an opportunity to do something with it. The IPA was with US-05 and the saison was with Belle Saison. I have experience with US-05 taking long to floc and I believe I heard similar reports for Belle Saison. Normally, this doesn't bother me and I find that that my beers eventually seem to clear. However, I heard that Biofine has a limited shelf life; possibly it has passed its best-buy date. Either way, I feel like I should either use it for the sake of experimenting or just dump it and a few odd dollars down the drain.
Peter, I brewed a Hoppy Saison with Belle Saison yeast (it is now 1 week in the bottle). That brew went from OG = 1.058 to a FG = 1.001. This was my only time using this yeast but it was a beast! I will be bottling a Simcoe/Amarillo IPA tomorrow. Good luck with your beers! Cheers! Jack
Just kegged my saison. The beer dropped from 1.052 to 1.000. You might recall that this is the recent beer that didn't sparge and I lautered it with a paint strainer, resulting in an 18% increase over my usual efficiency. With my extra efficiency and the crazy attenuation, my what started out as petite saison ends up at 6.7%. I went down this road with WY3711, too. Surprisingly, it's very sweet tasting up front (maybe that's the esters fooling me?) up front with a slightly tannic finish. This was an uncarbonated sample, so perceptions of sweetness are likely to change. There is still a lot of haze (yeast, tannins?) so I'm going to give it a a dose of the biofine just to see what happens. Maybe that and time in the cooler will cause some of the tannins to drop?
ive used biofine in kegging. does make the beer a lot clearer. try 10 mLs for 5 gallons, should do the trick.
