# Adding Activated Carbon To Primary Fermentation?



## pablopblo (10/8/11)

What would happen if i added activated carbon in with the mix in the fermenter during primary fermentation? 

has anyone done this? 

what were the results?

I'm hoping this will filter the brew, making a crisper finish, and filter our some nasties?

thanks for your help.


----------



## Synthetase (10/8/11)

Surely if you really wanted to run beer through a carbon filter, you'd have to do just that: run it _through_ the filter so that unwanted substances would be trapped in the matrix of the filter material and be removed from the filtrate. Just adding carbon to primary will probably just make it taste like carbon. I wouldn't do it myself but I'd love to hear what happens.

Anyway, what are you trying to achieve here? What sort of "nasties" are you trying to remove? If you have off flavours, it may simply be a symptom of poor fermentation conditions which is far easier to remedy then over-complicating things with filters.

A carbon filter would likely remove a lot of flavour from beer if passed through it and therefore defeat the purpose. (Distillers feel free to correct me here - I haven't used activated charcoal for anything like this before.)

Anyway, welcome to the board and happy brewing.


----------



## MHB (11/8/11)

Years ago I had a go at making clear beer, ended up looking like lemonade with a head and sickly sweet.
Hop compounds (apparently all of them stick to activated carbon) and all get stripped out.
MHB


----------

