Ye of little faith. Did you think I would give up on this beer? Well, I did consider it, but then I thought instead that this might be a good opportunity to test out some clarifying techniques.
There are some clarifying agents that you can add at (or near the end of) the fermentation stage, but I asked around and every one of them seemed to come with the warning “That’ll drop your yeast out of suspension.” I could have been intimidated into repitching before bottling, but I thought that this might be a good opportunity to test whether the original yeast was hardy enough to survive the clarifying process.
I decided to take a shot with the seemingly least harmful option: good old-fashioned unflavored gelatin. I took one packet, dissolved it in 2 cups of water, and poured it in the carboy. I let that sit for a couple days, and then I transferred to a secondary carboy (with a hop bag over the end of my siphon, as a filter). Then I attempted to do a cold crash: I took a couple shelves out of my fridge and stuck the carboy in there until it dropped to about 30 degrees. (Wish I had a picture of that. Talk about a bachelor fridge.)
As you can see, the results were pretty striking. This is the clearest, best-looking beer I’ve ever made—it’s muddy predecessor now just a bad memory. But there are still problems ahead. (1) I won’t know if it affected my yeast until I bottle. (2) Somehow in all this, the flavor has gone off. The bitterness and alcohol are on point, but there is a faint wet dog smell that is throwing everything off. I doubt that this is going to work itself out in the bottle, so I’m going to have to perform a little more surgery to take care of it.
Never, ever underestimate the power of the yeast. Shown here is the formerly muddy pale ale after 1 week in the bottle. Not a bad head for such a short time. Given these results, I think it’s clear that the yeast were tough enough to survive my clarifying techniques (gelatin and a cold crash).