98 replies to this topic

[neddles]

How they do things.

 

You can go over there and see for yourself. No reason to take my word for it. As Ken said there are all kinds of alternatives. People are not only using different methods but several are evolving at any given time. Things often need to be tailored to individual brewhouses/situations. It not the methods that are fixed in stone so much as its the end goal that is the same. At least that's how I read it. 

[Big Nake]

I agree. You have a lot of different brewers there using a lot of different equipment & processes. You also have people who are firefighters (or whatever) whose schedules aren't very conducive to perfect timing on a batch of beer. So everyone finds alternatives. There are very resourceful people over there and the truth is that all of this is still evolving. Ideas are getting bounced around constantly. The idea that someone gave me for how to purge kegs and transfer the beer to the keg in a low-O2 way was a HUGE deal for me. And the best part... it cost me nothing! The trick is to separate the message from the messenger and I can't take credit for that phrase.

[positiveContact]

I agree. You have a lot of different brewers there using a lot of different equipment & processes. You also have people who are firefighters (or whatever) whose schedules aren't very conducive to perfect timing on a batch of beer. So everyone finds alternatives. There are very resourceful people over there and the truth is that all of this is still evolving. Ideas are getting bounced around constantly. The idea that someone gave me for how to purge kegs and transfer the beer to the keg in a low-O2 way was a HUGE deal for me. And the best part... it cost me nothing! The trick is to separate the message from the messenger and I can't take credit for that phrase.

 

well it sounds like some things have changed about the general culture then.  before it sounded very much like "you can do it this way or you can just be like the rest of the idiots out there!"

[Big Nake]

A new, full article on CO2 impurities is HERE. I'll mention again that everyone is going to do what they want in terms of making, serving and drinking great beer. Maybe I'll decide to do all the low-O2 'early stuff' and then force-carb and consider my beer to be good enough for me. But I think the spunding thing makes sense to try at least once. Technically you don't even need a spunding valve... you could just wait until you had 2-3 gravity points left and then transfer to the keg and let the rest of the fermentation carb the beer. So it really costs you nothing to try it. The resulting beer could be so good that you decide to take that approach all the time. As for dispensing the beer with CO2... I don't know if he covered that.

[HVB]

 As for dispensing the beer with CO2... I don't know if he covered that.

Says in the article it oxidizes the beer. 

[Big Nake]

Says in the article it oxidizes the beer.

A couple people over there have mentioned that when their kegs get around half-full and less, they can detect some beer degradation. What I meant to say in my last post was whether he mentioned what to do about the possibility of CO2 oxidizing the beer (by dispensing with CO2) and what alternatives you have. I feel like once you get to this point now you're really splitting hairs. Are German lagers dispensed using CO2? Maybe not all of them but I know I saw German, Austrian and Czech beers in bars & biergartens served on gas so I'm not sure that anyone is going to improve on that part of it... not on the homebrewer level anyway.

[HVB]

A couple people over there have mentioned that when their kegs get around half-full and less, they can detect some beer degradation. What I meant to say in my last post was whether he mentioned what to do about the possibility of CO2 oxidizing the beer and what alternatives you have. I feel like once you get to this point now you're really splitting hairs. Are German lagers dispensed using CO2? Maybe not all of them but I know I saw German, Austrian and Czech beers in bars & biergartens served on gas so I'm not sure that anyone is going to improve on that part of it... not on the homebrewer level anyway.

Maybe my taste buds are just not good enough!

[Big Nake]

Maybe my taste buds are just not good enough!

I've always had this idea in my mind, believe me. I think it's very possible for things to get so fine that not everyone is going to be able to tell. Everyone's tastebuds are different and everyone's expectations and idea of beer are different. As I said, in the end I might decide to keep the low-O2 ideas that are early in the process in place and then just let the beer fully ferment out, close-transfer it to a keg, gel it, force-carb it and decide that the beer is far better than it was and far better than most beers you can get and then my research will be complete. But I do want to try some of this stuff first.

[positiveContact]

That 30ppm of O2 is the spec not the real world amount.

[positiveContact]

I also have a hard time bringing myself to rack fermenting beer to the keg. So much stuff that has to settle out when you do this which means jumping to another keg. No thanks!

To be clear I have tried this and it was not a fun experience. I don't think the beer seemed any different but that is easy to dismiss with the standard thinking on this topic since I wasn't doing all of the other stuff.

Edited by pickle_rick, 19 January 2018 - 10:51 AM.

[Big Nake]

I don't plan to send the beer to another keg. With 5 or less gravity points left there will be a good percentage of the yeast laying on the bottom of the primary. I do expect to see some glasses of sludge at the beginning but I already have glasses of sludge now. Once that's out of the keg then things should be okay. If a low-O2 fining option comes up then I'll probably use that and maybe there will even be MORE sludge in the first glass or two. Toss those and go. The information here is for whoever is interested and I realize that some are not. It's all good with me.

[positiveContact]

I don't plan to send the beer to another keg. With 5 or less gravity points left there will be a good percentage of the yeast laying on the bottom of the primary. I do expect to see some glasses of sludge at the beginning but I already have glasses of sludge now. Once that's out of the keg then things should be okay. If a low-O2 fining option comes up then I'll probably use that and maybe there will even be MORE sludge in the first glass or two. Toss those and go. The information here is for whoever is interested and I realize that some are not. It's all good with me.

Have you actually let a beer finish fermenting in the keg yet?

[Big Nake]

No.

[denny]

A lot of people mentioned that and I consider the information to be good just based on the number of people who gave it to me. Plus, I have no counter-argument. I have no idea what percentage of a tank of CO2 is O2 nor would I expect that answer to be consistent. I have gotten CO2 tanks filled at welding places, fire-extinguisher places and homebrew shops. No idea if there is a difference. Remember too that everyone's beer reality takes place in their own brewery, their own beer and their own head. If I were to use CO2 to force-carb and concluded that my beer was good enough for me, that would be fine. I would like to see how the spunded beer comes out so I can make that determination for myself.

 

Circular group think

[Big Nake]

I think it's important to remember that these guys aren't selling anything. Some of them are engineers and chemists and I have no real counter argument to what they're saying because I am not an engineer or a chemist and I have not looked at any of this. So I would like to see how the beer comes out using this process so I can compare it to what I've been making. What happens after I make a few of these batches is anyone's guess. But I would like to have that experience for my own purposes. It's as simple as that. What reason would they have to come to some unfounded conclusions and then tell other people about it?

[neddles]

I think it's important to remember that these guys aren't selling anything. Some of them are engineers and chemists and I have no real counter argument to what they're saying because I am not an engineer or a chemist and I have not looked at any of this. So I would like to see how the beer comes out using this process so I can compare it to what I've been making. What happens after I make a few of these batches is anyone's guess. But I would like to have that experience for my own purposes. It's as simple as that. What reason would they have to come to some unfounded conclusions and then tell other people about it?

 

So you're going to try it out for yourself and see how you like it?

[positiveContact]

So you're going to try it out for yourself and see how you like it?

 

sounds fine to me!

[Big Nake]

I'm mildly surprised that the idea of naturally carbonating in the keg hasn't been discussed more widely in homebrewing. If there had been people talking about this, I just didn't hear it. For those who came from bottle-carbing with priming sugar (and the wait time, etc), force-carbing became a great new way to carb without the wait time and the idea of natural carb went out the window. It seems like many of these guys do it without even using a spunding valve and it can be done with as little as 2-3 gravity points left to go. On the one batch I made last week, I did not get that much yeast in the keg. Quite a bit was left in the primary for harvesting (although I retired that yeast). I just placed that keg in the fridge yesterday and I'll give it a bit of time to clear and pull a sample in a week or two to see if I get some schputz first and then clear beer after that. With the spund, I'll use less 'tanked' CO2 which is nice and I can also pull my 20# CO2 tank out of my on-deck fridge and now fit another keg (5 total) in there which is a win.

[positiveContact]

I'm mildly surprised that the idea of naturally carbonating in the keg hasn't been discussed more widely in homebrewing. If there had been people talking about this, I just didn't hear it. For those who came from bottle-carbing with priming sugar (and the wait time, etc), force-carbing became a great new way to carb without the wait time and the idea of natural carb went out the window. It seems like many of these guys do it without even using a spunding valve and it can be done with as little as 2-3 gravity points left to go. On the one batch I made last week, I did not get that much yeast in the keg. Quite a bit was left in the primary for harvesting (although I retired that yeast). I just placed that keg in the fridge yesterday and I'll give it a bit of time to clear and pull a sample in a week or two to see if I get some schputz first and then clear beer after that. With the spund, I'll use less 'tanked' CO2 which is nice and I can also pull my 20# CO2 tank out of my on-deck fridge and now fit another keg (5 total) in there which is a win.

 

would you typically cold crash before kegging or least let the beer clear at "cooler" temps before kegging?  the one time I tried to do this I had A LOT of stuff in the keg.  if I remember correctly the beer was a pils so it had a good amount of hop matter in the keg and even this hop matter caused me issues b/c it had not compacted and was taking up more space than normal at the bottom of my fermentor so when I racked it clogged up the racking cane.

[positiveContact]

It must have been making a hoppy pale ale but I can't correlate these dates with my notes to figure out exactly which beer this was:

 

https://brews-bros.c...g-valves/page-1

Edited by pickle_rick, 29 January 2018 - 04:48 AM.