Easier Wort Oxygenation

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KingBrianI

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Imagine a pack of foil-wrapped tablets. You pop them out of the package into your cooled wort and like alka seltzer, they fizz up when they hit the liquid. Only instead of CO2, they produce 02. Before dropping them in, you reference a website that allows you to type in your wort volume, OG, temperature, and desired O2 ppm. It then tells you how many tabs to drop in the beer. Easy. Sanitary. Accurate.

I'd buy it. Now, does anyone know what the tabs could contain to create O2? Alka seltzer contains citric acid and baking soda, which reacts to create CO2 and sodium citrate. What can be used to produce O2 and non-harmful byproducts in wort?
 
Your muscles...Shake the snot out of your carboys...If you have a big conical get some people to help you rock it around a bit...

If you are using a pub style stainless tank then get a stone for oxygenating.
 
Your muscles...Shake the snot out of your carboys...

Skipped right on past the "easier" title, eh?

This is a tricky topic. CO2 is easy to make, but O2 is harder. Commercially it's just made from air using either distillation or a permeable membrane. The way kids make it for science experiments is usually electrolysis. Peroxide decomposes to water and O2, but it's fairly stable at legal concentrations (I think they add metal chelators to the commercial stuff)
 
Hydrogen peroxide does indeed decompose into water and oxygen but it is a pretty powerful oxidizing agent and I fear it would oxidize something in the wort and even possibly damage yeast.

But why do we oxygenate wort in the first place? So the yeast can synthesize sterols. This has caused some to reason that we could skip the oxygenation step if we simply supply sterols and this has been done - even commercially. There was an article in the MBAA Quarterly about this a couple of years back. The sterol source they used was olive oil.
 
I wouldn't use them.
I brew my own beer so I know it is free of shat like that.
 
get yourself a lox (liquid O2) cart that we use to service an aircrafts breathing O2 :) (just kidding) but seriously that lox cart will cure a hangover in a *snap*

I'd use a tablet like that if it's byproduct is simply oxygen and water.

Or Efferdent?

Efferdent:

H2O2 (Peroxide) + Water + Catalyst = O2 + H2O
 
...seriously that lox cart will cure a hangover in a *snap*

Does this really work for you? I remember reading, in my youth when I used to drink enough to get hangovers, about a local fire chief who got fired because he was using the firehouses O2 packs to clear his hangovers. So I tried this cure with aviator's oxygen and it never did a thing for me (except cause people to ask me why I was sitting at my desk with an O2 mask on).
 
i would think getting the O2 into solution would be the hardest part

we use diffusion stones to make the o2 smaller and easier to dissolve in the wort - simply releasing o2 prob wouldn't get the same saturation

perhaps the tablets could be used with a diffusion stone like tube etc though
 
Some believe that proper preparation of the yeast starter, with correct levels of Oxygen cancel out the need for Oxygenating wort. Same can be said for proper pitching of rehydrated dry yeast so the tablets don't have as much sex appeal as I'd want in a pill.

However I like your thought process and figure you will hit on something great at some point.
 
I know is kind of an old post but for what is worth: Don't they make oxygen tabs for bait buckets? Plop one in and shake the hell out of the fermenter while the tab is fizzing in the mix. Not sure of any harmful chemical byproducts the bait tabs may put off. They may eventually kill the fish at the end of the day. I’m poor, so my budget doesn’t allow for that kind of experimentation.
 
I know it's kind of an old post, but for what its worth: Don't they make oxygen tabs for bait buckets? Plop one in and shake the hell out of the fermenter while the tab is fizzing in the mix:ban:. Not sure of any harmful chemical byproducts the bait tabs may put off. They may eventually kill the fish at the end of the day. I’m poor, so my budget doesn’t allow for that kind of experimentation.
 
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