Capping on foam

I bet your beers suck by doing what you do.

Bit if sherry and cardboard are you main go to flavors.. Keep on keepin' on, but don't argue the fact that what you do is less than ideal.

 

Okay, think about this though. If you saw that it takes several weeks.. then what would you assume.. 2-3 weeks? 3-4 weeks?

If you bottle prime, which we are talking about, several weeks is what it normally takes for a green beer to prime, and carb, and then you have to chill it to get the co2 into solution better. Your several weeks have taken place before you get to drink them.

5 gallons of beer might not seem like much to you, to drink within a week or a couple of days, but I figure most reasonable people don't/can't do so. Therefore, I would think that by doing the really crappy job of bottling like FarmerTed does, that the beers would be oxidized.

Why do breweries co2 flush their bottles? Why to good growler shops, purge the growlers before filling? Why do beer guns come with the ability to purge your bottles with co2 before filling?

There's a reason.

 

This is exactly my point regarding IPAs. Some styles will suffer less when bottling. IPAs, with their very delicate essential oils, will suffer more. In my experience (not everyone's though)...

 

Yea I actually thought of this shortly after my post, so I will concede the point. I was just leafing through some brewing textbooks and while I was unable to find evidence confirming or denying what I said, I did find one interesting tidbit: Oxidation happens slower at lower temperatures. This is actually pretty obvious but can be useful lets say if you suspect a batch is oxidized you can refrigerate it immediately after conditioning to lengthen its shelf life (again, obvious)before oxidation takes hold.

The bottom line is the less oxygen in your final product the better. I agree that FarmerTed's process is adding more oxy than he should, but I don't think it would be very different to the amount normally in headspace. Using oxy-absorbing caps, chilling the beer after conditioning, and drinking while fresh mitigates the risk of off flavors from oxidation.

But yea I was assuming around 3 weeks. Most of my bottles are carbed in just over 1, and are chilled in hours. That gives me around 1.5-2 weeks before my 3 weeks are up. Plenty of time to knock back 50 bottles with some friends if you wanted to. And definitely longer than a few days.

 

ok, this is very simple.
there are only a few things that are absolute in brewing, and packaging best practice is one of them.

you want as close to zero dissolved oxygen in your beer after fermentation is complete. no exceptions. this is not debatable.

if you bottle condition, the yeast may indeed consume some oxygen that may be present, but it is a risk and adding oxygen is just asking for problems. no brewer has ever achieved 0 ppm dissolved oxygen in their bottling line and you are no exception. this is not debatable.

foam, that is the release of CO2, will absolutely purge oxygen in the headspace, but 1) oxygen in the headspace is not the same as dissolved oxygen introduced via splashing and 2) unless your beer is fully carbed before capping, as it is in a brewery, you are doing it wrong.

sophisticated packaging lines inject a violent blast of purified water to agitate the beer and generate the foam needed to purge the headspace. Your brewery is anything but sophisticated, and this too is not debatable.

DO NOT introduce any oxygen after primary fermentation is complete.
as homebrewers, you and I are not breaking new ground in the art of packaging.


end of discussion.
Cheers.

 

I agree with everything in your post except this.

 

I'll just point this out...rationalizing poor bottling procedure by advocating quick consumption doesn't make the argument any less absurd.

...and now I've just given @VikeMan 's last post weight

 

But... Funnel???

 

Don't be modest. You've discovered a completely new viral topic! With a 3,000+ year old hobby, that's something that doesn't come along every.

 

It's bigger than you now.

 

If you find yourself in a situation where you are capping on foam. You are probably not capping at the homebrew level. Or, if you are. It's far more serious than you let on.
You are also probably a pretty experienced bottler; cos capping on foam is a ride for consistency.

 

Sorry, but you're wrong as well. It's funny how I never hear back about sherry or cardboard flavors on score sheets, but feel free to believe what you want to believe. There's a lot of ignorance here, that's all I can say (not that that's a big revelation).

 

Oxygen in the head-space isn't the same as dissolved oxygen? This is what I have to argue against? Really? Please tell me what the difference is between these two forms of oxygen.

This is from Garrett Oliver in the Oxford Companion (yeah, I know the book is scoffed at, but his discussion on bottle conditioning is relevant):

"With the rise of craft brewing worldwide, bottle conditioning is on the rise, if only on a relatively small scale. Some larger breweries have taken up partial bottle conditioning of (sic) a belief that the active yeast will remove oxygen from the beer and extend shelf-life, but this is only partially true. You can remove small amounts of dissolved oxygen from beer, but very little from the bottle headspace air, which means that these benefits will only attain to breweries using sophisticated bottling methods and very good packaging equipment."

You might try calculating the amount of O2 in the headspace of a bottle of homebrew. It's more than you think. And again, tell me how much O2 pickup there is filling a bottle with a small amount of agitation.

 

It's already been pointed out several times that capping on foam is a method successfully employed by the beer industry. However, it has also been pointed out that they purge the bottles with Co2 beforehand. Now, are we supposed to assume that the industry, that has an interest in efficiency and cost reduction, is doing so for shits and giggles?

It's good that you don't notice any oxidation, or that some of your beers haven't been scored lower because of it. But, you shouldn't be giving advice based on anecdotal evidence. If you have some reliable information on the subject, I think we'd be all ears.

 

Yes, there is a lot of ignorance on here, but not a lot from FATC1TY. Going through many threads on here, he's one of the more knowledgeable folks here.

 

This reminds me of the threads where people argue that their beer tastes "fine" without ever using a starter and therefore, starters are a waste of time for all beers ever... end of discussion no matter what anyone says!

For the benefit of any new brewers reading this thread: Homebrew42 and Vikeman are experienced and knowledgeable brewers, this other dude is flat out wrong.

 

So you don't see the difference between oxygen that has been forcibly dissolved into your beer due to agitation, and the slight amount of oxygen exposure that occurs at the surface of the beer in the headspace of the bottle? Personally, I would much prefer the headspace exposure versus actively dissolving oxygen into my beer via forced foaming in an oxygen rich environment.

 

Why am I wrong? Here, let me run some numbers (not that it will help). How much O2 is in 1 mL of air at 20 C and 1 atmosphere of pressure? The answer is ~0.25 mg of O2. So, if you cap a beer with ~10 mL of air in the headspace, you'll be sealing in 2.5 mg of O2 in the bottle, that is going to be sitting right on top of the beer, and much of which will not be consumed by the yeast during carbonation.

In "Yeast", there's a table on aerating wort, and according to the table you can get 2.7 ppm of O2 in a 5 gallon bucket of wort by shaking it for 5 min. Let's assume the rate of aeration is the same during bottling, with some agitation (I'll call it 5 seconds, which is an over-estimate). At the same rate, you would end up with ~0.1 ppm of O2 in the beer. They use mgO2/L wort to calculate ppm, so assuming the bottle is ~0.35 L (a 12 oz bottle), you can estimate that there will be 0.25 mg of O2 in the beer at bottling. Maybe I've still got 1 mL of air in the headspace. Then, I'm looking at 0.5 mg of O2 in the bottle at sealing time. By my calculations, it's quite a bit less than bottling the wrong way.

 

I'd rather have it in the beer, where the yeast can use it to propagate and lower the overall levels of O2 in the beer (try seeing Garrett Oliver's article I linked to above). If you want to 'protect' the O2 by having it in the head-space, go right ahead.