Beer Filter - Plate Filter

A bit of a learning curve to use, especially knowing when the filter is clogged up (it starts leaking). Otherwise, love it!

It works, but what a crummy design.

The filter works as advertised, I did not have much leak while the the filter is in use. I was able to push about 120 gallons of wine through it and probably lost about 1.25 gallons.

It is annoying to use this filter with 120 gallons as it takes about 20 filter changes. I did it with 10 because the wine had been racked and cold stabilized prior to use.

I had to use a decent amount of gas to push, also its easy to push with too much pressure and waste the filter.

the biggest leaks happen when you switch the pads.

I had to add hose clamps to every connection which adds to the cost of the unit.

Very easy to use. I used gravity to provide the pressure and it filtered 5 gallons of plum wine wonderfully. Will use it for the cider next. I replaced the tubes it came with with some longer silicone tubes and placed the filter on the kitchen counter between two 3-gallon carboys (one high and one low). Once the siphon started it filtered through in 10 minutes.

I have used this 5 times, and on the 5th time the hose appeared to pull off of he nipple when I was putting in the filters. When I looked closer it turned out that the nipple had actually broke inside the hose. Also, assembling this while keeping things sanitary is cumbersome and tricky. Otherwise, it seems to do a fair job.

. Filters works very good. Thank you.

Nice .needs a thicker o-ring

I bought this along with the same manufacturer's Super Transfer Pump to filter my beers before bottling. In addition to clarifying the beer, I use polyclar as a fining agent and you're really supposed to filter it out to ensure you don't ingest any of it. The manufacturer's description of the pump explicitly states it's designed to work with this plate filter product. But I must state up front I'm not certain if the difficulties I've had are the fault of the pump, the filter, or some combination of the two.

So first, the good: when I finally managed to get the set-up working moderately well, it did a very good job clarifying the beer. The filtered beer came out super-clear, even using the rough pads, not the polish ones.

However, getting to that point is an incredible challenge. The filter is unwieldy to set up and if you want to run sanitizer through it before transferring your beer you have to run it, disassemble the filter to add the pads, and put it back together. This means completely draining the filter of solution (because of the design), which is difficult to do. When no liquid is being pushed into the assembly it doesn't push the liquid inside out, gases just blow right through the liquid. So if you really want everything sanitized you have to run sanitzer through your pump separately from the filter, and submerge the filter in solution before assembly.

Once the filter is assembled and hooked up to the pump, there are a couple of problems. One is that the filter definitely allows air to get into your beer as it passes through. I don't know where it comes from, I have all the hoses clamped down but the filter actually aerates the beer to a fairly significant degree. But the bigger problem is that the out-flow rate doesn't match the in-flow, and as you pump beer through the filter it becomes pressurized. This leads to seepage at best, but in the worst cases resulted in the filter springing high-volume leaks and shooting streams of beer all over the place. That's a lot of wasted beer. This seems to be worse depending on how much sediment is in your beer. When filtering a simple Ordinary Bitter it never pressurized to the point of explosion, but when running a winter warmer with sediment from various spices along with the yeast and polyclar, the beer could barely make it through the filter pads and ended up everywhere but in my bottling vessel.

The last problem is lost beer. Even without leaks I lost 1.5 liters of beer on my most successful filtration due to beer that was stuck in the filter after everything had been pumped in but not all been pumped out (see above). On runs that had significant leaks springing from the filter, I lost the majority of my beer and ended up just having to dump two batches. (Incidentally, these batches were all less than 10 liters. I can't imagine trying to run a 20-liter/5 gallon batch through this device.)

Although in once instance I managed to get a batch of beer through the filter that came out nice and clear, I can't recommend this product because of the challenges of working with it and the amount of beer potentially lost. As a final note, the instruction sheet that comes with it is minimal, leaving you to figure out most of what to do yourself.

This is a good filter. Makes your homebrew look prefensional and had a easier time finding filters of low microns the the cylender type filters.

The best filter available for the homebrewer, IMHO!

Overall this is a very nice product. I have filtered beer in two different ways in the past. I started with the aquarium style filter, but I was not satisfied with how much beer seemed to be wasted in the process and the fact that the filter leaked no matter what I did. So, I switched to the plate filter product described here. I definitely prefer the plate filter to the aquarium style filter. I ended up just using the aquarium style filter to carbon filter (dechlorinate) my brewing water from the hose - which it does well.

The plate filter does a great job filtering the beer. It comes out brilliantly clear. It also works well to filter the yeast out of ciders that you want to back-sweeten to avoid possible secondary fermentations. This way you mechanically remove the yeast and don't have to add chemicals to kill the yeast (if you're into that kinda thing).

However, a word of caution:

For awhile I had gotten really into filtering my beer. I loved the brilliantly clear character that filtration offered and made the beers look professional. However, I have noticed that filtering the beer does (at least in my hands) reduce head retention. The beer ends up heading a bit during the filtration process and once these proteins are used for heading, they don't come back. Also, if you are filtering very hoppy beers, some of the hoppiness (likely from filtering out polyphenols) is filtered out. I have started doing experiments with clarifying agents (gelatin to knock down the yeast followed by PolyClar do knowdown some of the haze from polyphenols) to clear the beer without stripping as much of the head potential and hop character. I have had early success with this technique and I plan to employ it again in the near future on a recent batch of IPA.

I would say that if making a beer that is supposed to be very clear - Pilsner for example, ciders - then the filter works great. I stopped using it on my IPA's though.