21 Ways to Open a Bottle of Beer

Debunking the Myth of Yeast Respiration and Putting Oxygen in Its Proper Place

Originally Published by Tracy Aquilla in Brewing Techniques (Volume 5, Number 2)

"Through it flies in the face of popular wisdom, yeast does not go through a respiration phase in the early stages of fermentation. A careful look at yeast metabolism and reproduction reveals a common misunderstanding and points the way to more sophisticated applications of oxygen in the brewery.

Fermentation is perhaps the most interesting and exciting part of brewing beer. There is something fascinating about watching yeast in action, and being close to the process contributes immensely to my enjoyment of my beer. No matter how well we do our part in preparing bitter wort for fermentation, it is the yeast that turns it into beer. For this reason alone, it is important to understand and appreciate what these microorganisms are really doing inside our fermentors. Most of the popular brewing literature, however, fosters a misconception about yeast and fermentation. This articles sets the record straight.

Most of the brewing literature indicates that brewers’ yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. uvarum) required dissolved oxygen for a brief period of time after pitching so the cells can respire and grow, implying that yeast needs oxygen to bud and must respire before it can ferment wort. It is true that aerating or oxygenating wort is generally beneficial to fermentation, but it is untrue to say that yeast requires oxygen to reproduce or that yeast uses oxygen to respire during fermentation. The misunderstanding may be subtle, but it is a misunderstanding nonetheless. Gaining a clear understanding of the truth about how yeast works not only sets us on sound technical foundations, but has practical applications as well. This article briefly discusses yeast metabolism, clarifies the role of oxygen, and suggests some practical applications of this more refined understanding of fermentation processes."

Read the rest of the article: Here

Understanding Malt Analysis Sheets -- How to Become Fluent in Malt Analysis Interpretation - Greg Noonan

"No two batches of malt are alike. The only sure way to predict their effect on your brew is to ask for and know how to read malt analysis sheets.

You are a serious grain brewer. Whether you brew professionally, as a hobby, or as an obsession, you take pride in your beer. You do everything you can do to reproduce each of your recipes accurately from brew to brew. Or do you?

Like most serious brewers, you probably adjust your hopping rates to reflect the alpha-acid content of each new lot of hops you purchase, but do you adjust your grains for changes in color, moisture, and extract potential? Do you know that a mere 2% increase in the moisture content of a new lot of malt accompanied by a matching drop in the extract potential can drag the density of a 12 °Plato (S.G. 1.048) wort down to 11.5 °P (S.G. 1.046) or increase the cost of malt 31/2%? Do you know that the color of dark-roasted malts commonly varies by 25-50 °L from lot to lot, or that one maltster's "dark crystal malt" may be 40-45 °L while another's is 80-90 °L and someone else's is 120-130 °L?

Even slight changes in malt specifications may have perceptible consequences, combinations of lot-to-lot variances in the color, moisture, and extract content of malts can seriously alter a recipe's results. Whether you brew at home or at work, the more you know about the malt you use, the better and more consistent your beer will be. You can enjoy that gain without suffering any pain -- understanding and using malt analysis sheets is neither difficult nor unpleasant." - Greg Noonan

You can read the rest of the article to learn malt analysis here

5 Liter - 12 Bottle - Brewing Experience (Facts & Pearls)

Hello,

So I have been brewing for over four months now with the Go Pro Small Batch Brewing Kit:

Here is what I have learned and I hope it helps you if want to get started to brew beer cheaply.

1. The "Little Big Mouth Bubbler(LBMB)" holds about 4.5 liters. This comes to the top line and leaves enough air room for good fermentation.  Trub and yeast will typically take up about .5 liters in waste.  This leaves about 4 liters to bottle with.  Adding a little liquid with fermenting sugar in the secondary should allow you to bottle 12 bottles of beer at a time :)
2. The LBMB is a joy to clean because of the wide mouth.  There have been some negative comments posted on the quality.  I have not experienced that and I now own 4.
3. I have purchased a small stainless steel pot that has worked out perfectly for me.  See Amazon link above.  If you fill the pot to the lowest handle rivot, you are starting with exactly 6 liters of water.  With 1/2 hour boil, you will loose about 1 liter. Leaving 5 liters of wort.  That allows for some waste to hit the 4.5 liter mark in the Little Big Mouth Bubbler.  Also 5 Liter brewing makes the math much easier :)
4. I find that a 30 minute mash @153°F or 67°C (partial mash or BIAB) and a 30 minute boil is all I need for these small batches. 30 minute mashes have been validated by others and they seem to work just fine.  30 minutes provides just the right amount of hop addition flexibility.
5. ***Very important to watch the boil and prevent boil over because this leaves little clearance. You just need to catch the first sign of "hot break" and take the pot off the heat and then put back on and you will be fine.***
6. Right now I find Safale US-05 fermenting at 64°F degrees x 1 week is clean and dependable.  Carbonate in bottle x 1 week then refrigerate x 1 week and you have good beer in under a month :).
7. Start to finish including measuring and clean-up is around a 2 hour process :)  If one only used extract then I am certain the entire process from start to finish could be under an hour!
8. Expect 80% brewhouse efficiency and 60%(LME)-70%(All Grain) attenuation with this system.  
9. 1000 mg of grain/extract will produce about 50 PPG in 5 Liters averaging 5% ABV (4% LME to 5.5% all grain). This translates to 1% ABV per 200mg of grain or 250mg of LME.  How cool is that!  
10. Your mileage may vary a bit because of all the brew variables (ex. technique, grains used, yeast choice and fermentation temp.) but you should come close to my stats above.
11. I am going to make a video soon to show the process from beginning to end.

Cheers!

Jim

How to remove beer labels the easy way! - Oxyclean

BrewTan Explained

"Colloidal (haze) and flavour (taste) stability of beer is considered worldwide as the label of quality of a beer. Due to its unique properties Brewtan has a positive impact on both quality metrics.

Brewtan B, Brewtan C and Brewtan F ,very specific gallotannins, react with the haze sensitive proteins (proteins rich in proline) and SH-group containing proteins by adsorption and precipitation. In addition to the interaction with these proteins, the Brewtan products are able to complex iron and as a consequence inhibit the Fenton oxidation reaction.

Brewtan B brings the stabilisation upstream in the brewing process, with an increase in flavour stability when used in mashing in and an increase in colloidal stability when used in boiling. Brewtan B can also be used simultaneously in mashing and boiling.

Brewtan C is injected proportionally in line before maturation or settling tanks. This is an easy and economical solution for a complete or a steady background stabilisation.

Brewtan F is injected in line before end clarification with a filter (Perlite, Kieselguhr) in order to have a perfect stabilization without beer losses."

Source: Here

Whirlpool Hopping

Olive Oil Vs. Aerating Wort

There was a very interesting research thesis published by Grady Hull entitled "Olive Oil Addition to Yeast as an Alternative to Wort Aeration" which can be found here.

In short, Grady sought to find an alternative to aerating wort.  It would theoretically have the advantage of reducing the exposure to oxygen and therefore downstream events from the oxidation of compounds produced during fermentation.

"The real requirement for oxygen, then, is to help produce fatty acids and sterols, which are very important components of the cell membrane. The reason wort aeration (or oxygenation with pure oxygen) is considered so important to brewery fermentations is that yeast can synthesize the lipids needed for membrane biosynthesis only when dissolved oxygen is available. If yeast had an independent source of these important lipids, however, the so-called requirement for oxygen could theoretically be eliminated completely." - MoreBeer

"By mixing olive oil into the yeast, during storage, instead of aerating the wort, fermentations can be achieved with only minor increase in fermentation time. The beers produced from these fermentations were comparable in flavor and foam retention to beers produced by traditional wort aeration. The ester profile of the beers produced using olive oil addition was significantly higher than the controls and the flavor stability of these beers was significantly improved." - Grady Hull, Abstract

Source: ResearchGate

Role of Ergosterol in Yeast: "Ergosterol (ergosta-5,7,22-trien-3β-ol) is a sterol found in cell membranes of fungi and protozoa, serving many of the same functions that cholesterol serves in animal cells. Because many fungi and protozoa cannot survive without ergosterol, the enzymes that create it have become important targets for drug discovery. Ergosterol is a provitamin form of vitamin D2; exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light causes a chemical reaction that produces vitamin D2."
-Wikipedia

Experiment results:

"Overall, the experimental beers and the controls were very similar — similar enough that the brewery released the final experimental batches to the public. Head retention times in the experimental beers were only slightly less than that seen in controls. Fermentation times were slightly longer, but the differences between the experimental and control groups shrunk as the amount of olive oil increased. And, the beers made with olive oil attenuated as well as the control beers. Ester production was greater in the experimental beers (and remember that ester production increases as wort aeration decreases), but not to the degree that the tasting panel thought it was outside of the brand’s specifications. In fact, the tasting panel preferred the olive oil beers to the controls. And finally, when the tasting panel compared beer samples that had been aged warm for three weeks, they detected less oxidation in the olive oil beers than the aerated beers. In short, Hull’s four experiments supported the idea that olive oil could be used as a replacement for aeration, increasing the flavor stability of a beer — at least in the case of average strength ales." - BYO Olive Oil Summary

White Labs also conducted some experiments found here.
More White Labs data here.

How Much Olive Oil Should I Use?

"So how much olive oil in beer yeast should I be using? During the trials, New Belgium brewery would pitch 4500 liters of yeast into 168000 liters of beer. Into the 4500 liters of yeast, they would add 300 ml of oil. To scale this down for 5 gallons, we need to use about 0.0000833 ml of oil. For almost everyone, this is impossible to measure. There are 60 drops of olive oil in a teaspoon, and a teaspoon is 5 ml, so a drop is about 0.0833 ml. You would need about 0.001 or 1/1000 of a drop. As you can see, the amounts are miniscule. It was suggested on Northern Brewer's forum that one way to get this small amount would be to dip a toothpick into the olive oil and then transfer this amount over to the wort."
Source: Winning-HomeBrew.com

"Olive oil will not dissolve in wort and must first be dissolved in 100% ethanol. For any homebrewers reading this – do not add a drop of olive oil to your beer. I had to weigh 1 gram of oil, dissolve it, and make a serial dilution until I had close to 0.1 ug/ml."
Source: ScienceBrewer.com

"At ordinary temperatures even absolute alcohol is not a good solvent for vegetable oils since the solubility is even less than 10 g. of oil per 100 g. of alcohol."
- Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society: February 1959, Volume 36, Issue 2, pp 77–80

See technique for adding adding olive oil being described below:

For the curious - Here is how olive oil can dissolve in alcohol and not water due to miscibility, molecular similarity and polarity.

Just in time for Oktoberfest: Quick Lager Method

"I’m a lover of all things lager- Márzen, Schwarzbier, Helles, and Pilsner are some of favorite styles. As a homebrewer, I initially avoided making lager beer due to my inability to precisely control fermentation temperature. Once I finally got my chamber setup and made a couple lagers using more traditional fermentation schedules, I found myself avoiding them due to how long they took to finish. I also began wondering how I might be able to hasten the process. I had learned that with precise control of my temperature, I could turn most ales around in 2 weeks and wondered why I couldn’t use this control to do the same with lager beers. I made a couple batches that came out surprisingly well, played with the method for a few months, and was gradually convincing myself the days of 2 month lagers were behind me. After numerous successful batches, I happen to catch an episode of The Session on The Brewing Network where Mike “Tasty” McDole mentioned how he takes lager grain-to-glass in 2 weeks using precise control of fermentation temperature. This was validating, particularly since I was aiming for a much less anxiety provoking 3-4 week turnaround." - Brulosophy

See Brulosophy for method instructions.  Fantastic!

This method is solid as long as you:

1. Pitch properly (as he indicates). If you under pitch a lager you're already toast, but would be especially detrimental here.
2. Are dealing with moderate gravity (~1.050).
3. Take a gravity reading before you crash it the first few times you do this to ensure you're done.
4. I wouldn't do this on the low end of the temp range. Definitely over 50, and probably more like 52+.

Source:  Homebrewtalk

Your Hops Cheat Sheet

1 Gallon Brewing - Innovation Advantages

I have been doing a lot of reading and studying to get myself up to speed with brewing beer.  One of my discoveries is that I can only drink and/or give away so much beer.  In addition, at first it may not be the best beer.   Because of this, I have settled on doing 1 gallon batches initially so that I can do more batches and learn faster.

Once I have a good recipe, I can then easily scale it up.  Also it allows me to create more variety around each month of the year which will be fun.

With these comments in mind, I estimate I can drink about a beer a day which would put me
at 365 beers a year.  A one gallon batch of beer will produce about 10 beers so that means I can make about 36 batches a year.

Since I cannot do this full time and have other commitments, my first target will be to brew a batch of beer about every other week or 26 batches of beer year.

If I get good and enjoy the process then I can move to brewing a batch of beer per week and give away some.

Cheers,

SirFrito

Different Types of Beer Glasses

Source: Fine Dining Lovers Infographic