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The Trub Experiment

JK, our recipe kit developer, renowned homebrewer and commercial brewer conducted an experiment using a beer with trub and one without to see if trub has the negative effects many believe.
Whilst reading a Reddit AMA with Peter Wolfe, an Anheuser-Busch brewing scientist, JK was drawn to a comment thread about the effects of trub on fermenting beer. Many people were pointing to an experiment conducted by brulosopher in which he deliberately includes trub in his fermenter to measure the results;
He states, ‘there is no appreciable difference between homebrewed beers when the trub is or is not transferred.’
JK began to question why he had always been so careful to pour the beer off of the trub when transferring it to his fermenter. What effect would including this sediment have on the overall clarity and taste of the beer and does it have any effect on fermentation? He decided he needed to conduct his own experiment.
METHOD
Brew an American Pale Ale and split the batch, being careful to avoid transferring sediment into one fermenter and deliberately including as much as possible in the second. This is to test what effect trub vs no trub has on the end quality of the beer.
RECIPE
4.5kg pale malt
1g Simcoe @ 60 minutes
150g Simcoe @ Whirlpool
Yeast: Mangrove Jacks Burton Union
The brew itself went without a hitch and after chilling his wort down to fermenting temperatures he poured half of the batch through a sanitised sieve to strain out as much hop debris and break material as possible before stirring all the trub into the remaining wort and pouring this all into a separate fermenter.
The gravities for the beers are shown below;
On Day 7 the fermenters were moved to the brew fridge to cold crash ready for bottling on Day 8.
After chilling at 12°C for a day JK took another gravity sample to check everything had stayed the same. After tasting the samples there were already some noticeable differences –the sample from the trub filled fermenter was much more bitter than the no trub sample.
Trub on the left, no trub on the right
After bottling there was some pretty interesting looking trub left in the fermenters;
No trub Trub
Overall he managed to get 14 bottles from the trub filled fermenter and 18 from the no trub fermenter.
Tasting
Then a blind tasting was carried out and 4 colleagues were asked to advise preferences on clarity, aroma and head retention then to state any detectable off flavours and if they could spot which beer had trub in the fermenter.
The beers were poured into 4 lots of separate glasses (so every taster had a glass of each).
Clarity differences (No trub on the left)
Clarity
The panel was asked which beer has better clarity.
Aroma
The panel was asked which beer had better aroma.
Head Retention
The panel was asked which beer had better head retention.
All tasters agreed that the head retention was similar on both beers
Off Flavours
Of the two beers, three of the four tasters said that the flavours in the beer with no trub were not as ‘clear’ or ‘defined’ as those in the beer that had been fermented with trub.
They were also asked to guess which beer had trub in the fermenter.
All four tasters got this question wrong.
RESULTS
No Trub
This was the second favourite of the tasters in terms of clarity, aroma or flavour – tasting similar to the trub version but the flavours were less clear and defined. Head retention was good but all tasters incorrectly identified this as being the trub filled beer as it was the significantly hazier of the two.
Trub
The hands down winner, this was everyone’s favourite for clarity, aroma and flavour. Good carbonation, it poured pale and clear with a good head. Some particles were still floating in the beer but the lack of haze led everyone to think this was the no trub version of the beer.
CONCLUSIONS
From this experiment it would seem;
  • A high proportion of trub can be beneficial, helping with clarity, aroma and overall flavour.
  • Trub may actually help sharpen beer flavours.
  • In a blind taste test none of our tasters could correctly identify the beer from the trub filled fermenter.
Obviously this experiment has taken things to extremes and we aren’t suggesting that any homebrewer would deliberately mix all the trub in their kettle into their wort and add this to the fermenter but the experiment does seem to demonstrate that there is no need to worry if some debris does get into your fermenter and in fact, some trub can be beneficial; aiding in clarity, aroma and flavour as well as providing nutrients for yeast. The downside is that you are likely to reduce beer yield from the fermenter (we got 22% less).

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