Compromise Elsewhere.
It’s quite the conundrum, but basically all methods we have tested and verified use active yeast and spunding. Since we have to break our purge to add hops, and since we know our purges are far from perfect to begin with, its a necessity to use those yeast for their oxygen scavenging abilities. There are…
We realize that many of the brewers who will visit this site will be keggers. At the volumes typically produced by the average brewer, kegging is an inevitability. But small batch brewers and keggers alike will no doubt bottle. As we know, bottles may be the best vessels in which to package low oxygen beer….
As with any lager production, proper lagering time is needed to clarify and refine the beer. Unfortunately we have yet to find an easy low oxygen solution to fining/filtering to accelerate that so we are stuck using other methods, namely time, temperature and yeast strain. Finding a medium to medium-high flocculating yeast is going to…
I touched on the cold fermentation in the yeast post. But we will use this post to further dive into it. A few years ago there were some folks who rediscovered a novel approach to lager beer making, the accelerated fermentation schedule. Mr. Narziβ details and outlines this process in what we refer to “Die” and Mr. Kunze…
For those who are recirculating wort during the mash, use a pump to vorlauf or are simply sparging as normal, the return line should always be kept below the wort level. The traditional lawn sprinkler type return is too susceptible to oxygen ingress. A simple hose submerged can be all that is needed. I have found…
We here at Low Oxygen Brewing run Extech DO600 pocket testers. We find them to work pretty well for the price point. I would rely on them for all hot side process as well as oxygenation. I am fairly confident in them for some cold side readings, but once things get in the parts per…
After reading Kunze we found that thermal stress on wort is a real thing and we can taste it too. When experimenting with longer boils with a higher boiloff rate there was more color pickup and the wort then lost most of the fresh malt flavor that was present pre-boil. The resulting beer was not smooth…
Another big hiccup for Low Oxygen Brewing is people think they must have a dissolved oxygen meter, and while we feel they are invaluable in the brewhouse, it can be quite the expensive for a brewer wanting to try these methods out for the first time. I am here to talk you down from the…
We are at quite a disadvantage compared to commercial brewing for many reasons, however maybe the largest is simply surface area. If you compare the surface areas of these large macro breweries to us its quite ridiculous. However we can still contend, we have NaMeta, and we can limit our surface areas as well and it…
People think doing a FFT is super tedious and a pain in the @$$! But today I am going to tell you a super easy way! On day 2 of your main fermenting batch, simply pull 100ml or so from the main batch ( if you have a fermenter with a valve, super simple). If…