Cold side oxidation in pale lager

Time, if you have it. Or this, added at yeast pitch:

 

P+G/t=clear lagers when p = pressure G=gravity and t = time.

 

My personal 'process' is just permit time to clear out my beers including lagers.

My personal philosophy is to add as little 'extra stuff' to beer as necessary so I have never even tried gelatin. I do add a clarifier to the kettle though for all of my beers: rehydrated Irish Moss for the last 15 minutes of boil.

Cheers!

 

Yeah, time is your best bet. If you decide to add gelatin to a keg use a syringe attached to a gas quick disconnect with a little tubing. Zero oxygen exposure.

 

I’ve had a couple lagers that didn’t want to clear up, and I agree it is annoying.

 

Another vote for patience. I’ve only had limited success with keg fining. Gelatin has been hit or miss — mostly miss. I tried clarity ferm once; it didn’t seem to do much. Of course, YMMV. Cheers!

 

I usually use Irish moss but I'm not sure how effective it is. I have played around with Biofine but after ruining a batch with off flavors I stopped using it.

 

Use a lager yeast that floccs really well. Been using the Andechs strain (Rocky Mtn Lager, German Lager X) for the last 8 months And it’s shocking how quickly you can make clear lager with it.

Leave as much lager yeast in the FV as possible. Highly flocculent yeasts help with this... 2206 is also a good choice

kettle finings help, especially if the pH of the boil is correct when you add them

Add more Ca. Not a fan of making lager with “Pilsen” type water personally. 100ppm targets for Ca using mostly CaCl will help with flocculation and clarity.

 

I have always had good results with gelatin added at kegging, but it will generally clear without it in a couple more weeks, depending on the yeast strain. Good point on the Ca. Yeast needs at least 50ppm to flocculate; some need a little more. edit: it will clear eventually without the Ca but it might be a long time, hence the 3 month lagering in icy caves in the old days.

OP: I have found through trial and error that it pays to keep things as simple as possible as long as it still gets the job done.

 

I frequently use gelatin and rarely have any oxidation problems. The only problem with gelatin is that it tends to clear things a bit too much.

If you boiled the water fully and let it cool it should have next to no dissolved gases.
Cheers

 

How do you keep the gelatin solution from picking up O2 as it cools?

 

Same way as with all things cold side.

 

I'll bite! And that is...?

 

Pulling a full vacuum under nitrogen, which I am sure he is doing.. Duh.

 

Get it in the beer ASAP, hopefully under a CO2 blanket. The solution will pick up a little oxygen, but it is a very small volume inside a very small volume of liquid so the live yeast in the beer will probably absorb it if it makes it that far. The most oxygen you can get into room temp water using just air is about 8ppm, no matter how much you aerate, less for hot water. Without shaking, the gelatin solution will be under 1ppm. And that's for ~100ml of solution going into 20L of beer, so O2 in the beer is 0.005ppm or (probably) less. In addition there will be some CO2 dissolved in the beer and it will foam a little when you add the small volume of hot liquid. This will expel most of the oxygen that the gelatin addition puts in the beer before it can do too much damage.

 

My beers are not oxidized.
I use gelatin. There is no mystery process.

I know low oxygen everything is all the rage, but brewers have been making perfectly fine lagers for, well, a lot longer than we have been discussing low oxygen brewing. All done without vacuums, nitrogen, DO meters or anything special.
Cheers

 

American commercial brewers began paying attention to O2 levels in the late 1960's/early 70's. It did make their beer a little better. I can still remember the taste of the sip of PBR my grandmother gave me about 52-53 years ago. Green beer with an overwhelming corn flavor, but also plenty of cardboard or even wood. Ten years later my illicit sips of beer tasted a lot cleaner, though to this day there is the occasional poorly made lager that takes me back to my childhood (yes, I have made 1 or 2 of them).

But O2 is so bad for megabrewers because of ultrafiltration and pasteurization. They remove the yeast that could scarf up extra oxygen, then heat the beer to maximize oxidative damage. The beer is stable after that, including whatever damage was done. Craft and homebrewers don't generally remove every yeast cell from the beer or pasteurize, so oxidation issues are a little less urgent, unless really egregious.

 

I can see some of the O2 breaking out. (Not sure about "most.") But where will that O2 go?

 

Fair enough. But at the risk of pedantry, I have to say that all beers are oxidized. It's just a question of how much.

When you said that the boiled and cooled water should have next to no dissolved gasses, I though maybe you were capping the water somehow, and I was hoping to steal that. I built a gelatin solution keg injector, but have resolved to use it (gelatin) only when absolutely necessary, because I don't have a way to keep O2 from dissolving in the gelatin solution.