I am reading more and more about “popular” beers right now that are purposely turbid. Trillium comes to mind as many of their beers are uber-hazy.
Are breweries actually doing a turbid mash on these beers or is there some other method to get a real hazy beer?
**Pro. brewer friend of mine mentioned to me that for the most part these beers are just non filtered or in some cases flour is added. He also said that the actual turbid process is really a Flanders style thing.
Hazy pro beers are likely from massive amounts of hops.
A turbid mash is something completely different, used for brewing lambics. The large amount of starch and large dextrin chains are food for Brett and Pedio over an extended period of time. Turbid mashed beers are rarely turbid any longer by the time they are ready to serve.
Hazy and turbid are definitely not the same thing. That hazy NE pale/IPA style tends to use grains that leave behind protein (oats, wheat), a water profile that encourages haziness and lots of hops that leave behind hop oils. I do hear that some brewers add flour to the boil to try to set a starchy haze but I don’t think that is the best approach.
+1. It seems like it could lead to an unstable product and possibly be providing “food” for other microbes.
Having done it a few times, I’ve never found it to create problems, but I also didn’t find it effective in maintaining haze. Given time and cold temps the beer will clear even with flour in it. Most of the hazy beers I see are due to high hop loads. The polyphenols in the hops bind the proteins in the beer to create haze.
Most of the time it is the combination of the hops, maybe some wheat and likely a quick turn around to packaging that leads to a hazy product for the reasons stated above. A local Brewer spoke at a club reach session Thursday and noted that by the end of his serving tank, even his wheat beers turned to kristalweizen - he was wondering out loud how he could keep some more haze for a longer period, because his customers think that craft beers should always be hazy…