HOMEBREW Digest #4840 Tue 06 September 2005


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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
  Katrina (Bob Wilcox)
  faster chilling / esters (Matt)
  Re: Aeration (Scott Alfter)
  Guess the Contaminant ("Jeff Tonole")
  Counterflo (sort of) chiller... (Chuck Doucette)
  hose problems (Matt)
  Homebrew in New Orleans ("Chad Stevens")
  Yeast strain equivalency? (Paul Kensler)

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---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2005 21:20:21 -0700 From: Bob Wilcox <bobw at budget.net> Subject: Katrina Has anyone heard anything from Ron LaBorde. From his posts I know he is from Metairie, La Bob Wilcox Grants Pass,Or Draughtboard Homebrew Club Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 09:45:30 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt <baumssl27 at yahoo.com> Subject: faster chilling / esters Michael Eyre wants to chill his 10 gallons of wort in less than the 45 minutes he's getting with his current immersion chiller, and is considering counterflow or other designs. Here is another simple, cheap solution: use 2 immersion chillers (or 3 or 4) in parallel. If the cooling rate of a chiller is at any moment proportional to the temp difference between the wort and your tap water (a good first approximation), then some math shows that two chillers will indeed cool in half the time that one will (22.5 minutes for you). Three chillers will cool in 15 minutes. This is true IF your tap can maintain a "standard" flowrate through 2-3 chillers, which it probably can. Easy to check using cheap nylon fittings and vinyl hose. I use two 20-ft copper immersion chillers (3/8 diameter) to chill 4 gallons of concentrated wort to 15F above my tap temp in 10 minutes. Also, Phil Yates once said something about a "parallel immersion chiller," so maybe he has some suggestions. - ----- Nathaniel Lansing asks if the FOY sages ever answered an ester question, which I think was mine. I assumed they didn't answer because I had certainly exceeded the limit on how many questions are reasonable for one person to ask. But Dave Burley says they did answer--I must be blind because I can't find it in the archives. I asked if they could explain the condtradictory statements that "increased yeast growth leads to decreased esters" (because Acetyl-CoA is being used for growth and not ester production) and "increased yeast growth leads to increased esters" (because yeast growth requires more Acetyl-CoA production and eventually this Acetyl-CoA abundance leads to more ester production). Was this question indeed answered? Is is even possible to answer definitively? Is it possible to answer definitively if we only consider acetate esters? Is is possible to answer definitively if we only consider ethyl acetate? Anyone? If ethanol is never the limiting factor, then my uneducated guess is that ester production is at any moment proportional to growth rate, with perhaps a spike when growth stops. But then the only reason we'd have more total ethyl acetate production at higher temps is if the rate of reaction were increased or something. And I don't think I buy that. Matt Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 06 Sep 2005 10:21:35 -0700 From: Scott Alfter <scott at alfter.us> Subject: Re: Aeration John Schnupp wrote: > I found that I really didn't like the 3L flasks. One thing I found was that > it was very easy to get the flask to foam over. The flask is basically an > inverted cone and as the foam gets higher the volume gets smaller and it > pushes the foam out even faster. I make starters in a 1L flask. Starters made with malt extract tend to foam over, but starters made with sugar (ordinary white table sugar) don't have this problem. I measure 3.5 oz. (by weight) of sugar into the flask, add water to make 950 mL (close enough to a quart for government work), bring to a boil, and boil for 10 minutes. It won't boil over unless you have the burner turned up too high (flames shouldn't come up the sides of the flask). After the boil, start cooling with a sink full of cool water (borosilicate glass can handle the temperature shock). After a minute in the sink, add some yeast nutrient and/or yeast energizer according to their directions. If your tap water isn't cool enough, you can finish cooling in the freezer until the starter is down to pitching temperature. Toss in the yeast and let it go to town. I've used this method to make starters for everything from best bitter to wee heavy to sack-strength mead, starting with either a White Labs pitchable tube or yeast salvaged from a previous batch. One step is usually enough, but I made a second step for the wee heavy I now have in secondary. The first step used 5 oz. of sugar and a tube of WLP028; the second step used 10 oz. of sugar in the flask, with water to make 950 mL. It was boiled, cooled, and added to the growler along with some more yeast energizer and yeast nutrient. When pitched into the wort, this starter knocked the gravity down from 1.090 to 1.025 in four weeks. (I started using sugar starters for my mead batches, figuring it'd have more of a neutral character than a starter made with malt. When I found that they tended to not boil over nearly as easily, I started using them for beer as well.) _/_ Scott Alfter / v \ Visit the SNAFU website today! (IIGS( http://snafu.alfter.us/ Top-posting! \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet? Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 15:32:21 -0400 From: "Jeff Tonole" <jtonole at twcny.rr.com> Subject: Guess the Contaminant After 13 years of brewing, I have my first infection problem. And it's arrived at a particularly bad time, since I've been in a bit of a brewing frenzy recently (5 batches in the past few weeks, and most of them appear to have this problem). So, I was hoping that someone out there could help me identify the problem and figure out how to prevent it in future batches. A search through the HBD archives turned up this description (from 1990!), which is very similar to what I see in my fermenters: > a sort of bluish-green "skin" over the surface, patches of > what looked like bread mold floating here and there, and > a few gigantic bubbles that lasted for days. I would modify it to say that the "skin" is more white than bluish-green and looks like an oil slick on the surface of the beer. Another post in the archives (by a biologist) described a similar problem and identified it as bacilliform bacteria. (Would that be something like lactobacillus?) Each batch has a somewhat unpleasant aroma, but I did not taste any blatant off-flavors. However, the flavor of each had definitely changed from the previous time I tasted them. They were also kind of bubbly, like they were full of CO2. I brew outside, but everything else -- fermentation, racking, cleaning, etc. -- happens in the basement. We had a hot and muggy summer, and the basement got pretty musty. We have a dehumidifier, but it wasn't running all the time. It's possible I picked up some kind of airborne contaminant while racking. I'm also wondering about my sanitizing solution. I use Star San, but the bottle I currently have is about three years old. Does Star San lose its effectiveness after a few years? Another possible source -- I made a batch of wine and used some of the same equipment (racking cane and hoses, one fermenter) as I use for beer. The wine is fine, but are there bacteria or wild yeasts that may have migrated from the wine and caused problems in beer? I'm replacing all of my hoses and racking canes, and I'll be giving my fermenters an intense cleaning. Is there anything else I can do to prevent the reoccurrence of this infection? Apologies for the long post, and thanks in advance for the help. jeff tonole Ithaca, NY Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 14:53:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Chuck Doucette <cdoucette61 at yahoo.com> Subject: Counterflo (sort of) chiller... Mike, I have been using a similar setup since I started brewing and have had few problems with it. My setup is housed in a 5 gal. bucket obtained from Home Depot. I used 20ft. of 3/8ths copper tubing. The coil was formed using a gallon paint can, and fixed in the bucket with 1" PVC pipe sections as spacers between the coil and bucket. I can fill the bucket with ice and water and cool 5 gal. of wort to approx. 75 deg. in 5 or 10 minutes (or as fast as it will drain through a 3/8ths tube). Now that I am brewing 10 gal. batches, I have added a plastic spigot and just add more ice after draining a small amount of water. I am considering building a new one with more copper in a larger bucket, because the final temp. has not been getting down to the 75 deg. mark with the 10 gal. batches. It is no harder to clean or sanitize than a counterflow chiller, and has been quite easy to use. Chuck O'Fallon, IL Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 15:28:13 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt <baumssl27 at yahoo.com> Subject: hose problems Recently I had two batches ruined by infection. Because of some bottle-to-bottle variation, increasing nastiness with time, and because the beers tasted great in the fermenter, I suspected my vinyl bottling hose was the source of the infection. The hose smelled suspect, looked suspect, and was discarded. Beers bottled with a new hose did not suffer from infection. I'm not confident that I can keep standard clear vinyl hoses clean and free of both microorganisms and chemical residues for more than a few batches. They seem porous and unreliable, and don't smell good even when new. So I ordered some high-temp thermoplastic rubber hose, which can be boiled to sanitize. Unfortunately, this 3/8" ID hose does not make a tight seal when slipped over a standard 3/8" acrylic racking cane, so it entrains air into the finished beer if you try to siphon with it. Bad. I tried steel hose clamps--they don't solve the problem. My questions are these: 1. Is it safe/advisable to boil regular vinyl tubing to sanitize it? Will it leach unsafe or untasty chemicals into my beer? 2. Does anyone know a convenient/sanitary way to make 3/8" ID thermoplastic tubing seal tightly on a 3/8" acrylic racking cane? 3. Can anyone convincingly state a regimen for keeping standard vinyl hoses clean for more than a few batches? Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 15:57:14 -0700 From: "Chad Stevens" <zuvaruvi at cox.net> Subject: Homebrew in New Orleans >From time to time my job takes me away from home. Just about everywhere I've gone, homebrewers have taken me under their mash tuns and kept me safe and sound. Well, in about a week I'm being deployed to New Orleans to bat clean-up. I'm not sure how mobile I'll be, but if any of you from New Orleans to Biloxi (most likely Baton Rouge area) would care to help me keep my sanity...send me an email off-line. I look forward to mashing in with you (or helping you drink your warm brew before it goes bad), Chad Stevens QUAFF San Diego Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 17:10:34 -0700 (PDT) From: Paul Kensler <paul_kensler at yahoo.com> Subject: Yeast strain equivalency? I seem to remember somewhere, that somebody had been keeping up a yeast strain equivalency table that documented which yeast strains were the same across various yeast suppliers. I've googled and googled, but I can't seem to find it. I'd like to track down the Wyeast or White Labs equivalent or comparable strains for some old Yeast Culture Kit Co. and Brewtek yeasts I used to brew with... Thanks in advance, Paul Kensler Tampa, FL Return to table of contents
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