How does “clearing” beer affect flavour and mouthfeel

So Im brewing a Mango Lassi Milkshake IPA. One of the things I forgot to do while boiling was to add my Irish moss.

I was looking up alternatives on what I could do, where I found out things such as finning agents such as gelatine. I realised after review that Im basically creating an NEIPA if I do not do anything.

This made me research a bit more and as far as I can tell this whole operation is not so much about flavour rather aesthetics.

I wanted to understand more how finning agents such as Irish Moss or Gelatine affect the experience. I know about the clarity but would affect other aspects such as flavour or mouth feel?

Topic gelatin irish-moss homebrew experiments

Category Mac

1
answered at

Brewing a hazy beer like that I normally skip the Irish moss anyway so I think you're going to be fine.

Fining and the effect of flavor is beer style dependent... for the most part. In nearly all styles that are generally clear to brilliantly clear there isn't a lot of loss of flavor components from clearing/fining. In styles where some of the flavor is being contributed by stuff in suspension like yeast in a Hefe and white ale or in the case of suspended hop polyphenols for hazy IPA; in these cases you can expect SOME loss of flavors.

The same goes for mouth feel. Where some of these suspended things effect mouthfeel you'd expect a small drop when fining. But its minor.

I've said it before though that fining and flavor loss is not a light switch effect. The loss may be noticable if you had side by side beers to compare as in an experiment. But like in most brewing if you need to fine for clarity and you wish the beer had more of a certain flavor you'd more often have more luck figuring how to get more flavor (i.e. adding more of that ingredient) than eliminating the fining step.
Fining to me just doesn't drive that big of an impact on flavor changes. The recipe is a bigger control knob for that than is the process of fining.

(OK I'm off my soap box now.)

About

Geeks Mental is a community that publishes articles and tutorials about Web, Android, Data Science, new techniques and Linux security.