Glossary
Filtration
Passing beer through a filter medium to remove yeast and haze-forming particles, producing a bright, stable beer.
The full record
Filtration has its own catalogue entry with the detail this page summarises — causes, thresholds, related styles and evidence.
Filtration — Pass beer through a filter medium to remove yeast and haze-forming particles, producing bright beer with a long, stable shelf life.
Filtration buys clarity and shelf stability at the cost of some body, foam-positive protein and hop aroma. How much is lost depends heavily on how tightly the beer is filtered — a rough polish costs little, a sterile filtration costs more.
A filtered beer cannot condition in the package, because the yeast that would do it has been removed.
Related
- Centrifugation — The mechanical alternative.
- Bottle conditioning — What filtration precludes.
More vocabulary
Arrested fermentation · Barrel ageing · Batch sparging · Biotransformation · Blending · Bottle conditioning · Bottom fermentation · Burtonisation · Cask conditioning · Centrifugation
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.