mate im going with tried and true methods of using gelatine when cooking. its sets best in cold liquid. simple as that. compounds in beer shouldnt make a differance to gelatin setting.
I also dont class gelatine as a traditional fining. most time when books etc refer to finsings they are refering to isinglass etc. but finings mean differant things to differant people.
anyways its a pointless arguement. people use what they like, how they like it. its all good.
edit: also as i said, i actually dont give enough of as shit as to the appearance of my beers to give too hoots what people prefer. they can do anything they wont and it doesnt bother me. although damn everyone who's having a beer right now. i really want one.
Gelatin doesn't set when its fining your beer, its dissolved and because of its electrical charge attracts yeast together to form larger particles than the yeast would form due to their own flocculation abilities. Stokes law tells you that particles with a larger diameter fall through a given liquid more quickly.... So gelatin (which is 99% the same as isinglass anyway) simply causes yeast to fall to the bottom of the vessel more quickly. It only does its job in solution... If it actually set it would not work (and your beer would wobble instead of pouring)
Another part of stokes law is the density of the fluid liquid through which the particle is falling... As the density of the liquid increases the rate at which the particle falls decreases. And it so happens that beer is at its densest at about 4C, which i reckon is a pretty common temperature for people to have their fridge set to.... And so chilling your beer before you add your finings agent, in fact makes that finings agent do the job of dragging yeast to the bottom as slowly as its possible to do.
If you are using actual isinglass.... Then you make the beer cold, because the molecular structure of isinglass is slightly different to gelatine in that it has very long molecules, on some side chains of that molecule there are oppositely charged regions which are capable of attracting and collating very fine particles of chill haze. So if added cold - isinglass is capanle of both dropping out your yeast and also reducing chill haze. gelatin cant do the chill haze thing and therefore does its work perfectly well, and in fact better in beer that is not so cold.
Polyclar is in fact NOT a finings agent in the sense of other beer finings agents, it has no effect on particle size of anything at all, it causes nothing to fall to the bottom of the vessel, it causes nothing to happen more quickly than otherwise it would. It simply absorbs one of the chemical components that wuld otherwise go onto to combine with wort protiens and form chill haze... It does not work by actually taking chill haze out of a beer, it stops it from ever happening in the first place. It does in fact do this more rapidly at colder temperatures.... But thats if you require it to do its job in seconds rather than being willing to wait an hour. Polyclar is in general a true process aid, it doesn't dissolve and theoretically there should be none of the compound left in the final beer. gelatin on the other hand does partially remain in the beer, it does not set and fall to the bottom, it stays in solution and only comes out of solution when it combines with the yeast, so if you overfine your beer, the gelatin itself can remain in the beer in excess quantities and cause a haze of its own.
Someone the other day was posting pictures of hazy beer... Perhaps you'd be more comfortable reading that thread?? i like clear beer because it is prettier and tastes better. Your welcome to your glass full of yeasty goodness, i prefer mine spread on toast for breakfast.
h34r: .
