What to do with IPLs?

If it is really hazy, it isn't a good lager or it hasn't been lagered. See my recent posting of some New England Franconian Kellerbiers. They are from New England, not New England style Kellerbiers. They are not crystal clear but I definitely wouldn't call them hazy.

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/notch-brewing-2020.631169/page-8#post-6920934

 

While I understand that a good lager is most often crystal clear, I've had a lot of hazy or cloudy Kellerbiers that were bottom fermented and very tasty.

In fact, when I get a clear Kellerbier I'm usually a little suspicious.

 

If by "really hazy", you mean turbid/muddy as in the NEIPA sense, no. But kellerbier (traditionally) is not clarified and contains some yeast in suspension, so it is typically hazy.

 

None of the Kellerbiers I had in Franconia last summer were noticeably hazy. But there are hundreds of breweries there, so sadly I have not tried all of them!

 

All of the Kellerbiers I ever had in Franconia were served in a clay Krug so you couldn't tell how hazy (or not) they were.

 

Very true. But the Mahrs U wasn't.

 

They actually are hazy, but they're not murky.

The misuse of the word"hazy" when beers are actually turbid and murky, has folks not even knowing what actual haze looks like in a beer,

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hazy?s=t

 

Nope.

 

It seems like the original question has been addressed and likely soon to be resolved.

 

Well... while we’re at it, Sierra Nevada’s kellerweiss was amazing. But how does the German purity law figure in?....

 

Weißbier (Hefeweizen) stands as a bit of an outsider in the German beer family. It doesn’t strictly follow the Reinheitsgebot but is an accepted style because certain breweries received an exemption by the Duke of Bavaria. And it isn’t a Franconian Kellerbier either, but a style from the urban area around Munich.

 

One of us got a funny Mahrs U then. I recently discovered and picked up some cans of this, and, at least speaking of my batch, it was not a clear beer. Absolutely delicious, but I definitely took note of the lack of clarity. Maybe I got a bad batch? Maybe you got a bad batch? If mine wasn't proper, I can't imagine how great a proper batch would be!

 

I've long suspected now that the haze in hazy lager beers has less to do with the lack of filtering and more to do with the expectation of the consumer that the brewery wants to meet. A visual cue that from the consumer's perspective is interpreted as freshness and a less processed product. Now, there might be factors which would produce a more hazy beer, a less flocculant yeast that remains in suspension for longer during secondary fermentation/lagering, and perhaps the geometry of the secondary fermentation vessel, say a large vertical lagering vessel. I could be entirely wrong of course, but that's my working hypothesis.

With each step in the process you ought to leave behind more sediment, firstly during the transfer from primary to secondary, then from secondary over to packaging. If packaged in kegs and served by anstich you have a further process of settling of the sediment below the tap, unless the keg is moved around carelessly before tapping and the beer is not allowed to settle once more, whereas with a bottle any sediment at the bottom of the bottle risks being stirred up when pouring (though part of the sediment may have become caked at the bottom, and different yeasts obviously produce a looser or more compact sediment at this stage).

But then again, why would you serve kellerbier at the keller from bottles? When packaged in bottles or cans, assuming there's still an amount of sediment in the package, it's up to the consumer to either pour carefully and get a clear glass of beer, or do the swish and pour to ensure that the last part of the sedimentation process is wasted. That's similar to rolling around the keg right before tapping, there's no historical basis for such treatment of keg beer. Even with the short aged winterbier/schenkbier the idea was to have clear beer after the short secondary fermentation (3-4 weeks, what today counts as a long storage time for lager beer, i.e the old sommerbier) and then serving it from the barrel after allowing it to settle in the tavern cellar (or the brewery cellar). Cloudy beer was historically a brewing flaw when it came to bottom fermented beer, whether schenk or lagerbier.

 

I guess living in Massachusetts and seeing a million hazy (murky) IPAs has affected my notion of hazy, but here is the first beer I had in Bamberg last summer--an U at the Mahrs brewery:

 

I wish we got JA down here, I can’t remember seeing an IPL on the shelf here. We’re underwater with NEIPAS though there’s a shit ton on the shelf, and a few new WC IPAs, not an IPL I’ve seen.