What are you brewing?

[nzbrewer]

Since this is the most popular thread on the RealBeer.co.nz forum I thought I would start it here just to see what happens

[Tom C]

With no method of oxygenation other than racking from height and swirling into the fermenter I thought I'd try the tiniest drip of olive oil in the starter.  However it had no noticeable effect - same time to krausen, ferment etc and no obvious taste or head difference. 

Perhaps it's just not particularly applicable to small homebrew batches.

[Soren]

I haven't done the exact calculation, but when I use 1 ml per 1000 liter, that equals 1 microliter per liter. For a 20 liter batch that is 20 microliters. I may be wrong, but from chemistry class I seem to remember that one "standard size" drop is about 2 microliters. Therefore you would need 10 drops of oil in a batch of homebrew, not the tiny tiny amounts that I have seen people mention.

[Doublehoppy]

Well the things you learn....

That conversion doesn't sound right though Soren. 1 ml is a 5th of a teaspoon, so for a 20 litre batch we need 1/250 of a teaspoon. 10 drops must be far to much. According to , erh, Wikianswers, a drop of liquid is about 40 to 50 microlitres, depending on the liquid obviously. Therefore would need 1/2 a drop in 20 Litres. 

I may have stuffed that calculation up though..

 

[Soren]

hmmm, I think I stand corrected, I got my degrees of tenths mixed up I think.... which also means I have been adding too much olive oil. I should have known better than to trust my 7 am calculations...:)

I'm gonna go get a syringe before I add it to todays brew, so I can measure it with a bit more accuracy:)

In any case, as far as I can gather, head retention is the only thing that can suffer by adding too much. But even so, the amount of oil is small compared to the amount of oil I get from the hops...

[JoKing]

In my day job, I find that 1 drop of fat weighs in at .03 of a gram... FWIW.

[Soren]

your day job becomes more and more mysterious to me... what exactly is it you do?

[JoKing]

Hi Soren... I'll tell you about it over a beer one day.

[Mike Neilson]

I understand the purpose of the oil but why you doing it?

[Soren]

I understand the purpose of the oil but why you doing it?

 

I'm trying to extend the shelf life of the beer.

My thought is that oxygen is always bad for beer but brewers have come to accept that they must feed the yeast.

although the yeast consumes the oxygen very fast, malt and hop compounds will oxidize at a similar speed. The yeast may scrub some of this oxidation but I doubt all of it.

If a beer starts staling after 6 months, maybe this way it wont happen until 12 months?

Surely, if you could cut the oxygen and keep the yeast happy, this would be a good thing.

Basically, I am just trying to optimize the process with the resources I have on hand, it may not make a difference in the end.

[Mike Neilson]

Basicly what the wino's think!! Why oxidise your wine ever!! With out proper testing equipment its pretty hard to know where you are picking up 02 within the process.

What scarres me is post fermentation handling of the beer, you clean your tanks with water that has 8ppm of 02 in it you purge your tanks multiple times with C02 but there is still residule water in the tank as the tank remains wet, than you fill the tank with beer and basiclly you are adding 02 back into your beer due to the residule water remaining in your tank. I know its fuck all 02 but when your trying to achieve around 2-4 parts per billon dissolved oxygen in the bottle than it can be alot

[Soren]

There is a very fine line between brave and stupid Rev...:)

[Stu McKinlay]

tell me about it... 2 tonne of Heavy Peated Distilling Malt arrived in Lyttleton a couple of days ago.