Retrospective Clearing of Pectin after mixing with Alcohol

JayTee

Hi - I've only just found out that pectinase won't work well in the presence of alcohol. Groan! Due to a processing mess up, I mixed a fruit liquid with water to dilute some rum and realised the tsp of pectinase had been filtered out by the muslin, which was used to provide a first stage filtering and removal of fruit peel. So I added another tsp of pentinase to the rum mixture (intending to let it settle and take off the sediment in a small transparent conicle vessel), but it's not clearing because the overall mixture is 37.5% abv ...

I have read on some brewing sites that a number of brewers use gelatin, but I've read mixed reports of whether it would clear pectin or not.

Do I have any options please, or is this batch wasted? Thanks in advance

Smaug

How much volume are we talking about? If you have the time and space, cold crashing would work.

grim

You could try cold crashing and filtering with 0.1 micron (though this is still too large of a diameter to remove all pectin).

I've never tried it, but I hear pectin clogs filters like no-other, as it clumps and forms a thick gel over the filter media.

Smaug

Internet says this will work: Super Kleer KC Finings @ Craft a Brew

grim

Technically, you can use pectinase in spirits, but your dose needs to be very, very high. From what I can tell based on the mead crew, it's something like 4-5x normal dosing. That's in low alc, so spirits may be even higher yet. You could probably trial this in a few hundred ML and then scale it up if it works.

Now, I've never actually tasted pectinase to know if that would be good or bad, but most other enzymes I've tasted have been pretty rank and also unappealingly colored. So, adding enzyme into final product seems like it would be an incredibly delicate balance, that risks ruining flavor to achieve clarity.

richard

In our cider plant when we were running, we used Pectinase only within the first 12 hours of apple pressing and just prior to fermentation start. This was used to prevent browning of our apple juice.

richard

grim

Man, that's exactly why I won't ever work with fruit.

crozdog

Looks like @smaug is on the right track.

Googling "kieselsol and chitosan for clearing pectin in spirit" the AI overview states:

"Kieselsol and chitosan are used together to clarify spirits, but they may not be effective on their own for pectin haze. For pectin haze, you need to first break it down with a pectic enzyme before using the Kieselsol and chitosan combination to clear the resulting cloudiness"