Experimentale (UPDATED 2)
In an effort to test the efficacy of vegetable oils for replacing aeration of beer wort, I brewed eleven gallons to the following recipe:
- 6.6 pounds Briess Pilsen malt syrup
- 4 pounds clover honey
- 2 pounds Briess 80L crystal
- 1 ounce Yakima Magnum pellets, α = 12.5, 60 minutes
- 2 oz Mount Hood pellets, α = 5.2, 15 minutes
- 2 oz Mount Hood pellets, α = 5.2, 2 minutes
The batch was split 5/5.5 gallons (I didn’t try to make them completely equal.) A 3-quart starter of White Labs WLP-001 was decanted to 1 quart, and split into two sanitized pint containers. One pint was dosed with 0.5 ml of flax oil and pitched into the 5-gallon batch, and the other was pitched into the 5.5-gallon batch, which was aerated by 1 minute of vigorous shaking (this is a departure from plan, as I could not find the hose that goes from my oxygen cylinder to my diffusion stone.)
Five hours after pitching, here’s what it looks like (the foam on the right is not kräusen; it is left over from the agitation of aeration):
So far, so meh, as I have been saying.
Update 2/19/2008 22:00
It looks like there is a little airlock pressure in the aerated batch. No such from the oiled batch, but it is showing signs of yeast activity. Photos after the break…
The two fermenters after 30 hours. The foam on the right is probably mostly left over from aeration, but there is probably a little kräusen mixed in.
A little speck of foam forming in the oiled fermenter — there are several of these forming about a half inch from the fermenter walls.
The airlock of the oiled batch is still not up, but due to cooling effects it was actually sucking water upwards a bit when I checked it at 05:30, so the internal pressure has increased a bit.
The aerated batch is up.
A little on the cool side for WLP001, but at least I’m not worried much about the lag.
Update 2/21/2008 10:22:
Yesterday morning, after noting that the aerated batch was already bubbling and the oiled batch was not, I declared a lag-time champion, but it turns out I may have been a bit hasty.
When I got home last night, both fermenters showed a dense head of kräusen, about a half or three-quarters of an inch thick. However, the airlock was not up on the oiled batch, even though it was obviously working at this time (roughly 52 hours after pitching.) Inspection of the airlock showed that the level of water was low enough to possibly allow pressure to escape without raising the center cap. So it is possible that, had its airlock had enough water in it, the oiled batch would have been bubbling yesterday morning as well.
The smell coming out of these airlocks is awesome.