It is interesting. I wish there was someway to know how true it is, they seem very pedantic and a take it at their authority with little references. It would be difficult for me to try it without a large investment in equipment, since i have a copper immersion cooler, and a mash tun set up for top sparging.
Also not adding o2 to a lager yeast concerns me.
Ok im intrigued. One question though, how do you prevent oxidation during the decoction?
Actually two questions, is a stainless immersion chiller sufficient, or what do you recommend for cooling?
Ugh. I dont have a direct fire-able mash tun. This is getting problematic. Perhaps i should pick up an o2 meter first, do you all have a recommendation for a inexpensive one?
A summary of the main points:
- Hot Side Oxygenation is actually a big deal, but happens so early in the brewing process that homebrewers didn't know how to prevent it.
- Copper increases oxidation, so throw out your copper chillers.
- Grind grain slightly damp so the husks stay intact. Mill immediately before mashing.
- Degas your mash water by boiling it, then adding sulfite in fairly large doses (100 mg/l; a Campden tablet is 440mg).
- Chill to mash in temperature.
- Infuse with minimal stirring, by underletting if possible. If your grain floats it's trapping too much air.
- Cover the mash tun during the mash. They advocate a two-rest Hochkurz mash and melanoidin malt rather than decoction.
- Treat sparge water similarly (a bit less sulfite) to mash water, or use no-sparge.
- Expect lower mash pH and higher sulfate due to the sulfite scavenging O2.
- Boil at a high simmer rather than a rolling boil.
- Pitch before oxygenating.
- Keg in a CO2-purged keg before primary is complete. Keep headspace to a minimum and put a pressure relief on the keg. Allow some yeast transfer.
- If you re-keg or bottle purge and allow yeast transfer, consider adding sulfite as well. For bottling the easiest is to krausen and counter-pressure fill. For re-kegging the easiest is – don't.
Did I miss any high points? If you want to get into the details, of course read the paper – it's a quick and easy read, but very very opinionated!
Given all the debate about whether HSA is real, this is an interesting counterpoint to the skeptics. It reinforces my feeling that commercial brewing practice has a very different set of concerns that are either irrelevant to home brewing or (as in this case) pretty difficult to achieve without industrial process control. A few things stand out as easy to do – sulfiting to scavenge oxygen and pitching before aeration come to mind. Others (grinding and doughing in) seem a lot harder.
Aren't sulfites forbidden by Reinheitsgebot, and aren't these guys German? Some of their methods are certainly not used by German commercial brewers.
My opinion of the article is that it is very week from a scientific standpoint. The science world won't accept a paper presenting lots of things stated as "fact" without any supporting data. They don't even present any results of blind triangle testing, not to mention that they appear to have changed countless variables and concluded they are all important, without any indication at attempts to isolate individual variables and rank them.
I'll stick with methods that have better supporting data.
Brew on
p-values are cool, but seeing (and tasting!) is believing!
Actually it isn't at all. That's why we have double blind triangle tests!
Here I have a second opportunity this week to tell a favorite story of mine in this regard. About 3 yrs ago I was asked to write a chapter on beer color for a book Charlie Bamforth was doing (the final proof just went out today - hurrah). At right about that time ASC sent me a notice of a webinar in which Charlie was the featured speaker and the subject was beer color. Seemed to me it would be a good idea to watch that webinar and I did. In it he said "we taste with our eyes". I think everybody knows that but I was shortly after that invited to a gathering at which many of the local beer cognoscenti ((pro's, Master judges....) were to be present. I took two growlers containing similar lagers. One was darker than the other. I asked for criticism and comparative comments from several of these people and the distinctions they were able to draw astounded me. How much richer the dark beer was, how the one had more vanilla notes and on and on. One little lady asked if she could try nd upon tasting the two apologetically explained that she really didn't know anything about beer and was just accompanying her boyfriend but that she really couldn't taste any difference at all. I expect that you have figured out what the deal was by now. The emperor had no clothes. It was the same beer in the two growlers with a little Sinamar (I don't think the color difference could have been as much as 5 SRM). When my duplicity was revealed several people were pretty angry. One guy didn't speak to me for over a year and I didn't get invited back.
The point is, of course, that if you want to taste something badly enough, you will. As I said at the outset, this is widely enough appreciated that we use double (yes, even telegraphing of the 'right' answer to the taster can be a problem - look up der Kluge Hans) triangle tests with the triangle part being there to be sure the taster can correctly detect that there even is a difference.
So I think the guys are absolutely right to express the healthy skepticism that they have shown here. The devotees speak of the technique with almost religious fervor and wherever one sees that he is well advised to step back and say "Well let's see." Quotation from the Holy Books is often used in support of hypotheses such as the current one and I note that his is being done here. Kunze's book contains at least one glaring error (which the aforementioned Charlie Bamforth propagated by quoting in a fairly recent paper) and in fact he has very little to say about oxygen exclusion from mash including a statement to the effect that one should not minimize the oxygen content of a mash but rather reduce it.
None of this is to say that I think the thesis is a bad one. To some extent it makes sense. But you really want people to question and challenge and even try to prove you wrong. If you are on solid ground you will be vindicated.
Actually it isn't at all. That's why we have double blind triangle tests!
Here I have a second opportunity this week to tell a favorite story of mine in this regard. About 3 yrs ago I was asked to write a chapter on beer color for a book Charlie Bamforth was doing (the final proof just went out today - hurrah). At right about that time ASC sent me a notice of a webinar in which Charlie was the featured speaker and the subject was beer color. Seemed to me it would be a good idea to watch that webinar and I did. In it he said "we taste with our eyes". I think everybody knows that but I was shortly after that invited to a gathering at which many of the local beer cognoscenti ((pro's, Master judges....) were to be present. I took two growlers containing similar lagers. One was darker than the other. I asked for criticism and comparative comments from several of these people and the distinctions they were able to draw astounded me. How much richer the dark beer was, how the one had more vanilla notes and on and on. One little lady asked if she could try nd upon tasting the two apologetically explained that she really didn't know anything about beer and was just accompanying her boyfriend but that she really couldn't taste any difference at all. I expect that you have figured out what the deal was by now. The emperor had no clothes. It was the same beer in the two growlers with a little Sinamar (I don't think the color difference could have been as much as 5 SRM). When my duplicity was revealed several people were pretty angry. One guy didn't speak to me for over a year and I didn't get invited back.
The point is, of course, that if you want to taste something badly enough, you will. As I said at the outset, this is widely enough appreciated that we use double (yes, even telegraphing of the 'right' answer to the taster can be a problem - look up der Kluge Hans) triangle tests with the triangle part being there to be sure the taster can correctly detect that there even is a difference.
So I think the guys are absolutely right to express the healthy skepticism that they have shown here. The devotees speak of the technique with almost religious fervor and wherever one sees that he is well advised to step back and say "Well let's see." Quotation from the Holy Books is often used in support of hypotheses such as the current one and I note that his is being done here. Kunze's book contains at least one glaring error (which the aforementioned Charlie Bamforth propagated by quoting in a fairly recent paper) and in fact he has very little to say about oxygen exclusion from mash including a statement to the effect that one should not minimize the oxygen content of a mash but rather reduce it.
None of this is to say that I think the thesis is a bad one. To some extent it makes sense. But you really want people to question and challenge and even try to prove you wrong. If you are on solid ground you will be vindicated.
I am, actually, pretty much sold on the idea. Ever since I saw Sean Franklin's setup (Roosters) in Harrogate (tells you how long ago that was) with its CO2 flushed Steele's masher and CO2 blanketed mash tun I've been trying to figure out how I might rig something like that for myself. Never got around to it though.To that end, I'd really suggest that you try the mini mash test for yourself....
Actually it isn't at all. That's why we have double blind triangle tests!
Here I have a second opportunity this week to tell a favorite story of mine in this regard. About 3 yrs ago I was asked to write a chapter on beer color for a book Charlie Bamforth was doing (the final proof just went out today - hurrah). At right about that time ASC sent me a notice of a webinar in which Charlie was the featured speaker and the subject was beer color. Seemed to me it would be a good idea to watch that webinar and I did. In it he said "we taste with our eyes". I think everybody knows that but I was shortly after that invited to a gathering at which many of the local beer cognoscenti ((pro's, Master judges....) were to be present. I took two growlers containing similar lagers. One was darker than the other. I asked for criticism and comparative comments from several of these people and the distinctions they were able to draw astounded me. How much richer the dark beer was, how the one had more vanilla notes and on and on. One little lady asked if she could try nd upon tasting the two apologetically explained that she really didn't know anything about beer and was just accompanying her boyfriend but that she really couldn't taste any difference at all. I expect that you have figured out what the deal was by now. The emperor had no clothes. It was the same beer in the two growlers with a little Sinamar (I don't think the color difference could have been as much as 5 SRM). When my duplicity was revealed several people were pretty angry. One guy didn't speak to me for over a year and I didn't get invited back.
The point is, of course, that if you want to taste something badly enough, you will. As I said at the outset, this is widely enough appreciated that we use double (yes, even telegraphing of the 'right' answer to the taster can be a problem - look up der Kluge Hans) triangle tests with the triangle part being there to be sure the taster can correctly detect that there even is a difference.
So I think the guys are absolutely right to express the healthy skepticism that they have shown here. The devotees speak of the technique with almost religious fervor and wherever one sees that he is well advised to step back and say "Well let's see." Quotation from the Holy Books is often used in support of hypotheses such as the current one and I note that his is being done here. Kunze's book contains at least one glaring error (which the aforementioned Charlie Bamforth propagated by quoting in a fairly recent paper) and in fact he has very little to say about oxygen exclusion from mash including a statement to the effect that one should not minimize the oxygen content of a mash but rather reduce it.
None of this is to say that I think the thesis is a bad one. To some extent it makes sense. But you really want people to question and challenge and even try to prove you wrong. If you are on solid ground you will be vindicated.
...
To that end, I'd really suggest that you try the mini mash test for yourself and have somebody give you a series of 5 or 6 triangle tests with the worts. It will mean a lot more to you than what a panel of strangers says, because it's your own palette being tested.
...
Redox reactions are extremely temperature dependent. The same reactions that happen on the scale of hours at 45 degrees F take place within seconds at 150 F.
At 45 F, the speed at which the yeast take up the oxygen is much, much faster than the rate at which oxidation reactions take place.
but with that always seems to come the caveat that ascorbic acid, once oxidized (i.e. after it has reduced something), is now an oxidizing agent so that some metabite is usually used along with it.
This is something I don't understand. The Water book, for example, advises brewers to keep potassium additions to below 10 mg/L while at the same time acknowledging that many beers contain (from the barley) as much a 500 mg/L (in fact some contain almost a gram). I don't see how adding 20 mg/L to your water as a source of, say, chloride, is going to be problematical but I haven't tried it. The situation is similar, if not so dramatic, with sodium and yet the lore allows us greater flexibility in how much sodium we can add. Something doesn't compute here.I think you guys are smoking something funny if you think a possible MAX concentration of 25ppm sodium is the magic bullet. Dose the beer in your glass with 25ppm sodium. Does that do it for you?
This is something I don't understand. The Water book, for example, advises brewers to keep potassium additions to below 10 mg/L while at the same time acknowledging that many beers contain (from the barley) as much a 500 mg/L (in fact some contain almost a gram). I don't see how adding 20 mg/L to your water as a source of, say, chloride, is going to be problematical but I haven't tried it. The situation is similar, if not so dramatic, with sodium and yet the lore allows us greater flexibility in how much sodium we can add. Something doesn't compute here.
Look on page 234 of Kunze and you can see chemiluminescence detection-based measurement of oxidative reactions in the mash.
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