Yeast sediment is regular stuff found in homebrewed and craft beers, while it can occasionally be found in popular commercial beers as well. There’s nothing to worry about if you have found sediment or floaties in your beer because it’s pretty normal.
In short, sediment and floaties in a beer are not dangerous, so you can safely consume such beer. Yet, beer sediment can affect the taste of beer and make it cloudy while floaties may indicate that the beer is too old.
Let’s answer some usual questions regarding sediment in a beer. This will be of particular use if you are homebrewing your own beer because it’s important to understand how the sediment affects a homebrew beer.
What is beer sediment?
Sediment is the particles of protein and yeast which are formed during fermentation. After the fermentation is done, the beer goes into the conditioning phase and during that phase, the sediment settles down.
When you see a cloudy beer, you can be sure there’s lots of beer sediment in it and it has been shaken or disturbed recently.
Sediment is a normal part of any fermentation process and it can’t be avoided. The yeast eats sugars and produces them into alcohol and CO2, however, once it’s done, it goes dormant. As time passes, the gravity will push the yeast and protein particles down and this is called a natural filtration.
Some beer styles like Belgian beers have a higher amount of sediment because they are unfiltered.
What are floaties in a beer?
Those tiny floaties in a beer are the broken protein particles that originated from the sediment. They are pretty similar to the sediment you can find at the bottom of the bottles, but they do not cloud the beer too much because they are usually in the minority and have a different structure.
Floaties may be caused by age, improper filtering, or by being intentionally put for the sake of some brewer’s practices.
Is it okay to drink beer with floaties?
Floaties are also not dangerous for health, nor do they change the taste of a beer, so you can drink them. I have found floaties in many commercial beers, especially in IPAs, and rarely in other craft or homebrew beers.
However, I never minded floaties and always enjoyed the beer anyway without a single consequence. If you find a beer on a shelf in a local store that has floaties, it’s either because the beer is old (but still safe to drink) and/or it was recently moved.
In conclusion, you can expect beers with lots of floaties to diminish in quality to some degree, but they will never be dangerous. Floaties will only affect the taste if they are caused by age because not all beers get better with age and should be enjoyed sooner to experience their prime quality.
Can you drink beer sediment?
Sediment is perfectly consumable and it’s not dangerous for health, but it doesn’t taste nice to most people. I can imagine that in small amounts some people may enjoy it because I have heard stories where people intentionally shake the beer to cloud it before they drink it.
I can think of this practice being only good in certain beer styles, like hazy IPAs, but even then I personally am not a fan of sediment in a beer.
In my opinion, most beers are better without sediment or only with tiny tracks of it. The less sediment in a beer, the cleaner the taste, transparency, and color will be.
Sediment is also rich in B vitamins, especially in b12 and b9 which are good for humans. Thus, sediment plays a role in making the beer healthy when consumed in moderation.
Although the beer sediment may even be healthy for consumption, if someone serves you this much sediment as in the glass above, just say no. This is the reason why you always need to filter most of the sediment out of the beer before bottling.
How to remove sediment from a beer?
If you are not keen on sediment in your beer, you can either remove it before bottling or there’s not much you can do about it. I mean you could use a muslin bag or any similar piece of cloth to filter it prior to pouring in the glass, but that’s too much hassle that takes away from the experience and may not be absolutely effective.
If you are homebrewing your own beer you can either transfer your batch to the secondary fermenter and keep it there for a few weeks after the primary fermentation has been complete.
After you transfer the beer from the primary to the secondary, the majority of sediment will stay in the primary, and over two weeks most sediment in the secondary will also be naturally filtered out.
This is the best method for homebrewers who want to add clarity to the beer because conditioning the beer in the bottles straight out of the primary fermentation is always going to result in sediment.
Another method is filtering as they do in commercial breweries, but this requires expensive equipment, filters, and even fining agents for improved clarity.
I have written a guide on clarifying beer in 3 simple steps, so if you develop such practice with each brew you’ll have a crystal clear beer every time without much effort.
So, Is unfiltered and cloudy beer safe to drink?
This leads us to a conclusion about whether the unfiltered beer is something you should enjoy or homebrew and whether is there anything unsafe about it.
In my opinion, you should avoid old beers with floaters, so in case the beer has lots of small “snowflake-like” floaters I would carefully check the expiration date or observe its color, smell, and taste before drinking it to be sure it’s not spoiled.
If it is not infected or spoiled, floaters are fine, and if it was the result of aging it may only diminish in flavor but will still be perfectly healthy to consume.
Moreover, any other unfiltered beer with sediment will be safe to drink even if there’s plenty of sediment in it that makes it cloudy.
Once again, I don’t like the taste of sediment, so I always try to minimize it in my homebrew, and most of my bottles of unfiltered homebrew beer only have tiny tracks of sediment at the bottom.