Do You Filter Your Beer Through Fish?

[Thirsty Boy]

My understanding of PVPP is that it isn't intended that it will have any effect whatsoever on yeast haze, nor will it do anything to clear up chill haze. It will absorb one of the sets of compounds that combine to form chill haze. So it doesn't help clear it up, it prevents it from forming in the first place. If your beer already has a chill haze... the PVPP isn't going to work because the pre-cursors are already bound to each other, you'd need to let it warm up to the point where the chill haze dissipated, then the PVPP would work to stop it re-forming. (actually, I'm speculating about that bit... but it seems sensible to me??) Silica Gels like Lucilite do the same thing with the other half of the chill haze pre-cursors. PVVP takes out the protein part - Silica gel takes out the tannin part (or maybe visa versa)

Neither of them will help to take yeast haze out of your beer.

To keep away from chemistry talk... the collagen that makes up most of isinglass and gelatin' makes the yeast clump together, and big clumps fall to the bottom faster clearing up the beer more quickly... something in that process might effect chill haze, or perhaps make it settle faster as well, but it would be an effect on a very different scale to the effect of the PVPP.

So Ross is right that they are different sorts of "finings" used for different purposes.

As for "plastic in your beer" ... thats just silly talk. PVPP is comes in either a large particle size that falls to the bottom of a fermentor and is left behond with the yeast etc, or it comes in a fine particle size that works more efficiently but needs to be filtered out. In either case the actual stuff itself doesn't (or isn't meant to) make it into your actual beer. If you are plastic shy enough that you wouldn't ferment in a plastic fermentor... fair enough, but otherwise the "eew plastic" reaction makes a lot less sense than the "eww fish guts/cow hooves" one does.. some of that does make it into the beer

 

[Kai]

That's right, finings by nature settle out and are no longer in the beer. However, that's not to say trace amounts don't remain (if you'll pardon the double negative). PVPP is for polyphenols, silica gel for proteins. Remove one or the other and they can't react with one another. Not sure about reversing chill haze though.