NE Craze Tips

What's to stop you from fermenting in the keg itself and adding the spunding valve the same time you add your last dryhop addition?

 

I would guess cleaning it.

 

"Science" can mean different things, but for what it's worth, Scott Janish, whose views I respect, observed something similar to what @wasatchback reported:

Comparing this beer to the cooler London Ale III beer, it’s just not at the same level. The London Ale III beer pops with big fresh hop flavors and aroma where the pressurized ferment is less exciting, slightly muted.

Janish made similar comments in a recent BYO article on pressurized fermentations. I'm not saying he's right, I'm just noting that tasting your beer and deciding what works is a kind of science (or at least a kind of empiricism), and I wouldn't necessarily discount it relative to abstract theory.

[Edited to format post to make it clearer which passage is quoted. I always forget that the indentation formatting is unreliable.]

 

It looks as though I didn't even quote the most salient part:

Overall the pressure fermented beer aroma is more subdued in terms of intensity and fades rather quickly. The cooler London Ale III beer is extremely inviting (and big time apparent) with more of a soft sweet overly ripe fruit character of strawberries and raspberries with a bit of peach that all comes together to resemble a handful of sweet jelly beans. The flavor of the pressure fermented beer is lacking, overall it’s kind of boring. Maybe this lack of flavor is in part due to the high final beer pH of the pressure ferment (I couldn’t find any research to explain this).

 

Since you're obviously all about reducing/ eliminating oxygen... How do you go about dry hopping? What is your method to reduce exposure to oxygen?

 

Odd that he didn't use identical recipes for these beers.

 

This is a good point. When I have a chance I'll dig up the BYO article I mentioned and see what he says there.

 

That would be very cool.

 

So essentially bag your hops and push the yeast out through the tap when it's done?

 

Ah, this is a distinction I had missed.

In the "Tips from the Pros" section of the December 2017 issue of Brew Your Own magazine, Janish describes his experience with pressure fermenting. He largely recapitulates the findings reported in his blog post that I linked to above. He added this (emphasis is mine):

For subsequent beers, I experimented with letting fermentation go without pressure at normal ale fermentation temperatures waiting to bung up the fermenting keg until the end of fermentation, after adding dry hops. Despite heavy dry hopping, all of these beers lacked in hop aroma intensity.

As for now, I've stopped fermenting hop-forward beers under pressure. I still use the spunding valve after late hop additions as a means to help reduce oxygen pickup.

I would count this as corroboration of @wasatchback's experience:

Again, I'm not trying to settle the issue. I'm just pointing out that people are reporting experiences that don't line up with the scientific theory that is being asserted, and I don't think it's crazy to prize experience over a scientific explanation that could well be wrong. We're not talking about a violation of conservation of energy here.

 

How is the vessel closed from letting out aromas? Once the desired pressure is reached aren't you off-gassing taking aromas with it, through the spunding valve? Isn't this almost like pulling the pressure release valve to release oxygen during forced carbonation (which lets off a blast of aroma).. If you carbonated with the perfect amount of sugar left, then I agree it should preserve aroma though.

 

The thing is, with all due respect to the Op and his work and background... All various techniques are all subjective on the final product. Low oxygen brewing (on the home brewer level) for example, doesn't exactly make beer better just because a few people say so, or the science behind it 'proves' a certain benefit. Beer flavor is all subjective in the end.

Sure, spunding and following a bunch of the low O2 techniques will absolutely do something for the final product, especially if your technique now is poor. However, it's not necessarily always better. Much like what you see with the comments/feedback with spunding and a lack of hop aroma on hoppy beers. Some may argue that SCIENCE backs up how great it is for the end product, but again, it can't really be confirmed with a product that can't be PASS/FAIL or GO/NO-GO. It's beer. People love different nuances of the final product differently, so techniques may vary certain aspects but it's not always better.

I have played around a lot with low O2 techniques, including but not limited to preboiling/chilling mash and sparge water, underletting, mash caps, cold crashing under pressure with CO2, stainless chillers (vs. copper), etc... From hoppy NE DIPA's to light lagers, I personally have not really noticed much difference... Hop aroma and flavor hold up the same for the 2-3 months they are on tap, my beers stay light in color as they always have long term, showing no obvious signs of oxidation, etc... On a commercial scale, absolutely many of these techniques are make/break for packaging and all that as the beer will sit on the shelf (warm, usually) for months... But on the homebrew level, it's not always worth doing all these various techniques for incremental differences (not benefits, per-say) if your clearing that keg in a month or two, anyway. Especially if it takes any of the fun out of brewing. For me at least, some of those low O2 techniques complicate the process at times and take some of the fun away from the brewday. It's a pain to pre-boil and use a chiller to cool my strike water, for example, even if it only adds 20mins.

To each their own, though... I still enjoy reading all the feedback for various techniques and try them out when they make sense to do so.

Cheers!

 

On September 13, 2017 there was an AHA online presentation by Ricardo Fritzsche entitled Hot Side Oxidation (HSO) – Fact or Fiction?

For those of you who are AHA members you can watch an archived version of this presentation:

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/archived-zymurgy-live/hot-side-oxidation-fact-fiction/

IMO Ricardo did a very good job putting this presentation together and discussing the topic of Hot Side Oxidation (HSO)/Hot Side Aeration (HSA).

As Ricardo mentioned during his presentation there is no doubt that HSO/HAS occurs during the early portions of the brewing process (e.g., mashing, transfer of the mash, etc.) but the fundamental question is whether this HSO/HAS genuinely impacts the flavor qualities of the resulting beer.

There has been some scientific studies performed for the case of Pale Lager beers and the data of these scientific studies were part of the presentation. A number of brewing scientists were referenced including Professor Dr. L. Narziss, Dr, Charlie Bamforth, Wolfgang Kunze,..

I have read a number of papers authored by Professor Dr. L. Narziss but I have read more papers from Dr. Charlie Bamforth and listened/watched numerous podcast discussions by him (e.g., Beersmith Podcasts). One paper from Dr. Charlie Bamforth that I would recommend is:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2050-0416.2011.tb00496.x/epdf

I would encourage those of you who are members of the AHA to watch the archived presentation and decide for yourself whether HSO/HSA should be a concern for you in your homebrewing and whether implementing LODO (Low Dissolved Oxygen) techniques are worth the effort.

From my perspective some of the takeaway messages of this presentation are:

· All of the scientific data that has been obtained is for the case of Pale Lager beers. As Ricardo Fritzsche made mention a number of times during his presentation this data does not apply to non-Pale Lager beers (e.g., Ales).

· There is disagreement among the various brewing scientists as to whether HSO/HSA is a genuine concern for impacting beer flavor qualities.

· I have the most familiarity with Dr. Charlie Bamforth who has a Ph.D. in Chemistry and he has been a brewing scientists for many decades (first in the beer industry but since 1999 he has been at UC Davis and is the head of the Brewing Science program). His thoughts on HSO/HSA were summarized on page 40 of Ricardo’s presentation: “If the effect exists, it is small” and “Recommends that flavor stability be measured organoleptically”.

Maybe in the future some brewing scientist will study the effects of HSO/HSA on beers such as ales and measure flavor stability impacts organoleptically.

Cheers!

@invertalon @LeRose

 

Ricardo Fritzsche did a nice job collecting information and putting his presentation together but he is not the expert on the topic of HSO/HAS. It is more appropriate to consider what a scientist who has a PhD in Chemistry and has actually performed brewing science for multiple decades has to state on this topic: “If the effect exists, it is small”.

And just to mitigate any confusion, the above statement in quotes is not a mis-quote.

Cheers!

 

In addition to the various scientific studies (i.e., published papers), Ricardo also discussed a number of studies performed by breweries (e.g., Stroh’s, Carlton Brewing and Courage Brewing). The Stroh’s study was conducted in 1982 and it involved 100 sensory comparisons by trained beer tasters (i.e., organoleptically studied). Below is what chart 17 states:

“Also in 1982, unpublished results of the Stroh Brewery in commercial systems contradicted the above findings, stating that low-oxygen from milling to boil did not show any difference vs control in a series of over 100 sensory comparisons at different ages by a large, trained panel.”

Again, the above is not a mis-quote.

Cheers!