Attempting my very first homebrew and was wondering if anybody has used or had any thoughts on using Turbo Clear to help with clarifying your beer? Planning on bottle priming when the time comes. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm starting a Mexican Cerveza kit from Brewhouse just for information. Thanks in advance.
Turbo Clear is a Still Spirits product deliberately designed to drop Still Spirits Turbo Yeast out of a sugar wash. You generally make a sugar wash for spirits distillation - not for beer.
I'm not sure if you've seen what Turbo Yeast does to a wash, but it was initially bred for making ethanol fuel. It ferments hard and fast and produces a cloudy / milky solution that looks, smells and tastes awful. The cloudiness is from all the yeast and nutrient particles and can burn on the bottom of your still if you don't try and clear them.
Enter Turbo Clear - it exists to bind to the particles and drop them to the bottom of the solution.
Do you need to use it? Not really - as others have said, you can achieve the same effect much more cheaply by adding gelatin (dissolve it in warm water first) and then cold crashing your fermenter. I have done this several times and it yields a nice, clear beer. Of course it relies on you having the means to cold crash your fermenter - many people use an old fridge.
Interesting product. Its designed to really strip out 90+% of the yeast from a distillers wash solution. Seems like that might be pretty drastic if you planned to bottle condition. It might take longer than normal to carbonate if its really as good as it reports to be for removing yeast.
I think just good brewing practices and cold storage is fine for clarification. A little gelatin solution in the fermentor, cold for a few days before bottling might be a better approach that Turbo Clear.
If you are willing to potentially have to sacrifice the batch I'd love to see someone try it and then report back the results.
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