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Home Brewing and Oxygen

Purging Kegs With CO2 From A Fermenter

Purging Kegs With CO2 From A Fermenter

Home Brewing and Oxygen

Recently one of the things I have been focusing on with my beer making is fermentation practices. For a while now I have been using a temperature controlled fermentation chamber and yeast starters to make sure that I had sufficient quantities of yeast and an ideal environment for the yeast to ferment in. That being said, I have been pretty relaxed when it comes to oxygen levels and have been working on making progress in that area.

Just some basic information on oxygen and home beer brewing. At certain points in the beer brewing / beer fermentation process, oxygen can be either your best friend or your worst enemy and it is important to know when to add and when to avoid it.  Thankfully it is pretty easy to keep track of! The only time that you want to introduce oxygen to your beer is post boil and once the wort has cooled down and you are preparing to pitch your yeast. The reason for this is that yeast requires oxygen for healthy propagation. “Yeast use oxygen for cell membrane synthesis.  Without oxygen, cell growth will be extremely limited.  Yeast can only produce sterols and certain unsaturated fatty acids necessary for cell growth in the presence of oxygen. Inadequate oxygenation will lead to inadequate yeast growth.  Inadequate yeast growth can cause poor attenuation, inconsistent or long fermentations, production of undesirable flavor and aroma compounds, and produces yeast that are not fit for harvesting and re-pitching.” – Wyeast Labs. During the boil process, much of the oxygen is stripped away from the wort, so it is good practice to reintroduce oxygen back into the wort. There are several ways to accomplish this but the key is to do it in a sanitary way. Many brewers will rapidly stir the wort or swish it around in the fermenter and others will pump pure oxygen into the fermenter with a diffuser stone.  In my setup I keep the yeast oxygenation / aeration process pretty simple and meet in the middle. I use an aquarium pump with a stainless steel diffuser for about 15 minutes once I have transferred my wort to the fermenter.  It has an inline HEPA filter to make sure I am not blowing a bunch of dust or wild yeast into my wort. I also pitch the yeast at  the same time. You can pickup at yeast aeration kit from MoreBeer.com for about $35.

 

Yeast aeration

Yeast aeration

Once you have aerated your wort and begun the fermentation process you will want to do everything you can to avoid introducing oxygen into your beer.  Thankfully, the yeast will help you with this process.  As the yeast consumes the oxygen to replicate itself and converts the sugar in your beer, it is creating two main byproducts which are alcohol and CO2.  The creation of the CO2 will help purge any residual oxygen from the fermenter.  The next step is doing your best to avoid introducing oxygen to your beer when it comes time to transfer your beer to the keg. The most common way to do so is to purge your keg with CO2  from a CO2 tank and then push your beer from the fermenter with CO2 from a CO2 tank. In my setup the only thing that I do differently is that I use the CO2 being expelled from my fermenter during active fermentation to purge my keg.  You can view the setup in the photo at the top of this article to get a visual, but basically I am diverting the CO2 to the keg as opposed to pushing it the a flask filled with sanitizer. I user mini stainless steel ball lock valves that I picked up here from Amazon.  For the final step, I push CO2 into my fermenter to build about 3 PSI of pressure and move the fermented beer from the fermenter to the keg as shown in the following image.

Beer Fermentation

Beer Fermentation

David Hazelhop Hazy IPA

Home Beer Brewing Brewery

Home Beer Brewing Brewery

Recently I took about 8 months off from brewing beer. I have had a lot going on in my life and homebrew had to take a back burner for a little while. But there is something about October. It just feels like beer brewing season for me.  The air started getting a little cooler and I began to remember all of those little things that I enjoy so much about home beer brewing.  So I crafted a recipe, got some friends together and we brewed up a batch of Hazy IPA that we are calling David Hazelhop.  If it turns out to be good, I will post the recipe.  I have a few ideas for some tweaks that I would like to make on it for the next time, so we will see.  This was my first time using malted oats and I think I will add more of them to the next batch if this one turns out well.  Here are some photos from this brewing session.

 

Home Brewing Beer

Home Brewing Beer – Photo of me and the gang after the brew session, enjoying a can of Monkish Hazy

Homebrew, Homebrewing, Home Beer Brewing, German Mandarina Hops

Homebrew, Homebrewing, Home Beer Brewing, German Mandarina Hops

Transferring the Hazy IPA wort to the conical fermenter

Transferring the Hazy IPA wort to the conical fermenter

Homebrew, Homebrewing, Home Beer Brewing

My buddy not to excited about having to scrub up the mash tun

Homebrew, Homebrewing, Home Beer Brewing, Prost!

Homebrew, Homebrewing, Home Beer Brewing, Prost

 

Once this batch finished up I will either try to brew a slightly different version or try an idea that I have for a Viking IPA that uses the Kveik yeast!

The Kegerator Has Been Filled

The Kegerator has been filled to capacity once again thanks to lots of holiday home brewing. I am carbonating a hazy New England IPA and MoreBeer’s Hop Gatherer IPA. I plan on reviewing them in a week or two once they are fully carbonated and have some time to condition.

I dry hopped both of these batches, but what was unique about the Hop Gatherer IPA beer kit is that it came with something I had not previously used, Chinook distilled Hop oil. It comes in a tiny vial but smells incredibly potent! It is used as an alternative to dry hopping but I decided to use it in conjunction to help really develope the aroma in this West Coast IPA!

Distilled Hop Oil

Distilled Hop Oil

As you can see from the photo above, the vial is tiny and only holds about 10 drops or so of the distilled Hop oil. I dumped it right in to the keg immediately prior to putting the hatch on the keg to carbonate. The oil smelled strong to say the least. I put the empty vial on a shelf and my garage still smells like hops, which makes me happy; talk about aromatherapy!

New WestCoastBrewer.com Website

New West Coast Brewer Website

New West Coast Brewer Website

Happy and Hoppy New Year!  With the arrival of 2018, WestCoastBrewer.com is going to get a new look and feel! It will be a bit of a work in progress, fixing all of the broken links as the website transitions to its new format, so please hang in there with us. Ultimately it should be a big improvement to the old website! We hope that 2018 brings you only the best and plenty of good homebrew!