Capping on foam

Ignotum per ignotius

 

e pluribus unum

 

@GreenKrusty101 and @mikehartigan I think your knowledge of Latin is better than mine.

All that I could think of was an expression from the move the Life of Brian of: Biggus D#@&kus.

Cheers to Greenkrusty101 and MikeHartigan!

 

Please share your brewing scientist friend's data on Dissolved Oxygen levels in fully bottle carbonated (i.e. not CO2 purged) beers.

 

Maybe you will be able to see the data in an upcoming article in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing?

 

I can't tell if you're being facetious or not but it would seem that the burden of proof is on you, not VikeMan.

 

So is it data about Dissolved Oxygen levels in fully bottle carbonated (i.e. not CO2 purged) beers?

 

It looks like the old tag team of Homebrew42 and Vikeman are back. Sweet times?

Cheers!

 

I'm certainly glad HB42 is more active again, though it has nothing to do with tag teams. But if you mean BS will less often go unchallenged, I suspect you are right, and that will be a good thing for everyone.

 

Ad hominem.

 

OK, I'll play along.

So - beer, containing dormant but viable yeast, enters a bottle. Here, it encounters both dissolved oxygen and sugar. It initiates another life cycle. It begins consuming oxygen and sugar while multiplying in the growth phase. However, just as it is in the fermenter, the available oxygen is limiting. It consumes all the oxygen, ceases multiplying and plateaus growth wise. It consumes the rest of the sugar anaerobically then lies dormant at the bottom of the bottle.

In this situation, the oxygen is limiting and all that is dissolved before the sugar runs out is absent from the beer. However, the O2 in the headspace will slowly diffuse into the beer, staling it over a period of time.

This is the plausible scenario of FarmerTed's procedure. Small amounts of dissolved oxygen entrained during filling consumed in the initial growth phase once entering in bottle, prior to long term staling from exposure to head space. It would, in this scenario, be better to dissolve a small amount of O2 before filling, in order to prevent it from occupying the headspace.

I would still never, ever recommend this procedure, as you are still exposing finished beer to oxygen, and I don't know enough about the kinetics of essential oil degradation, or any other for that matter, to say which happens faster. Best practice is to beer gun that sumvabitch.

Finally - I have heard of large commercial breweries moving to natural carbonation in order to reduce O2 in the finished package, which would jive with my postulate above. However, I have no doubt that they will go to great lengths to remove oxygen prior to filling. The oxygen certainly does not help. Ideally, there is none anywhere.

 

Just from a common sense standpoint I don't understand how adding air to create foam results in less oxygen exposure in the bottle than bottling with a wand. The foam is full of air so you're still putting roughly the same amount of air into the bottle but you are helping dissolve it into the beer, unless you are filling the bottle with liquid beer nearly up to the top. If you aren't overfilling the bottles then you have air dissolved into the beer plus what is released from the foam as it dies down.

Plus the splashing is likely degassing CO2 out of the beer.

 

I'm volunteering to measure the dissolved DO of any bottled beer sent my way. I could easily compare fermentation to post re-fermentation if a bottle of unprimed was provided.

I recently bought a sate of the art optical DO meter and really need to incorporate this into my brewing. brewery geek fun and all that. the meter is lab grade and fairly idiot proof, which is good for me.

im serious. send me a bm if you are interested.

also,

brewing without a sense of humor is just bad karma man.

 

Well, I think transportation might skew the results a bit. I mean, have you seen the videos of how packages are treated at package hubs?

I think it would be a good test of just how much transportation affects DO in beer, but we'd need a baseline first.

 

I don't ship beer myself, but I could see how homebrew could be beat up. then again, it is routinely shipped for competitions.

one of the biggest obstacles in measuring DO levels is that it tends to change moment to moment. as soon as the liquid is introduced to a different atmosphere it begins to equilibrate. and temperature has a dramatic effect on dissolved concentrations, so you want the beer to remain the same temp throughout. finally, until very recently, DO meters required a fairly elaborate calibration, and the liquid had to be stirred to get a reading. all of this led to hazy results. the new style meter fixes most all of that.

 

Tom Nielson of Sierra Nevada discussed the effects of beer transportation on beer in terms of “scalping”:

“According to Nielsen, agitation during shipping can be a significant contributing factor to degradation in aroma. As a beer sits on delivery trucks and eventually finds it way to your local liquor store, the beer’s aromas can be kicked up through the head space and slowly forced out of the crown liner, a process Sierra Nevada refers to as scalping. Nielsen also says oxygen will destroy hop aroma very quickly, whether naturally over time, or through the bottling process.

“We’ve found the hop aroma of a fresh beer shipped overnight from Boston compared to the same beer that just sat here in Chico was very much reduced,” said Nielsen. “This degradation doesn’t noticeably impact bitterness. But since aroma plays a significant role in your perception of taste, it can greatly influence your overall enjoyment of the beer.”

It would seem that an experiment of measuring the DO in shipped homebrew bottle could be problematic?

Cheers!

P.S. Above quote is from: http://captainsbeerblog.com/2010/03/23/fading-hops/

 

Boom, thread over.

...not really of course, because arguing long past the point of having been proven wrong is apparently fun, but this simple point just took three pages of BS and put it in its place.

 

Probably the whole, " something in the order of 99.95%".. Sounds a bit.. oh, I don't know.. wishy-washy.

It's like me claiming that I got around.. I don't know.. "this much" done today, and holding my hands out in a fashion of "small, or large".

 

Fuckin right. There's so much in homebrewing that follows the statues quo. It's because it works. Great things are invented by people bucking the trend, and craft and homebrew does that. However, with that logic, there's a whole shit-storm of junk created and practiced amongst people that just simply doesn't apply, or work. See: BS.

PHD Ted can keep on doing what he wants. Apparently his judges in his area love the shit out of beer thats been slammed into a 12 ounce bottle via a spout from his primary fermenter, foamed out the top, and capped. Maybe it works for him. Maybe he get them to judges at the perfect time. Maybe he's full of shit and needed a way to make it sound good for his defense of his method. Maybe his taste buds love what he makes so no need to change it.

But, as I've said before here, I would, and I think several here would agree, would be remiss if we allowed, without challenge these "ideas" if you will.

Bottomline is, it's against advice, traditional advice, profession brewers advice to purposely add O2 to your beer post fermentation. There's a reason it's bottled the way it is, there's a reason we purge with co2, there's a reason we have CP fillers, and beer guns. Time and cost would be significantly less if the pro's all said to hell with those processes, and if there wasn't a difference, don't you think they'd know that, or find that out and then make an educated change to their process?

 

I could imagine a forum post a few hundred years ago in a similar vein:

"If three thousand years worth of brewing experience had shown a benefit to throwing in little green, sticky flowers at various points in the boil, don't you think we would have known it by now?"