At True Story Brewing Co. it’s not secret that we love our Hazy Beer.
And we are not alone, in recent year hazy beer has become a huge trend amongst craft beer lovers and so we thought we would break down what makes beer hazy.. and why we’ve grown to love both the look & taste.
Essentially, hazy beer is caused by insoluble material in your final beer, whether that’s due to yeast, hops, lactose or other adjuncts that may be added during the brewing process.
This type of haze in hazy beer is created from the protein and polyphenols extracted from the grain during the mash (the first part of the brewing process). Colloidal beer haze is created when two substances bond, creating large molecules that remain in suspension in the beer. The key to a stable beer haze is proteins – the protein molecules need to be big enough to be visible (to create the hazy beer), but not so large that they drop out of the beer post fermentation.
New England IPA
Tropical pineapple and ripe honey dew melon, with hints of fig and vanilla. Soft, with a lightly resinous finish.
Hazy Pale
A super juicy hop hazed pale, made with bucket loads of cold side, new world hops for intense tropical flavours.
Another reason for hazy beer is caused by yeast. To understand the beer haze caused by yeast we need to first understand flocculation, which is simply a process by which colloidal particles come out of suspension to sediment under the form of floc or flake, basically clumping together and dropping to the bottom of a solution.
Towards the end of fermentation, flocculation occurs and yeast cells starts to bond with other yeast cells – the high the ‘flocculative tendancy’ the more yeast will combine and drop out and the less vice versa. Therefore lower flocculation yeasts leave some yeast still in suspension creating that hazy beer look. However, this type of beer haze does tend to eventually drop out completely over time.
In some particular styles of beer, a beer haze is caused by the addition of hops. When hops are added during fermentation (dry hopping). The polyphenols from the dry hops combine with the proteins in the solution (from the grain), to create a hazy beer.
