Copper pipe adding nutrients for yeast?

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thewurzel

thewurzel

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I was just back home in England and went to a small brewery and had a good long chat with the brewer while he was mashing.

He suggested that every thing pre boil, mashing and sparging, should be ran through copper pipe.
Then use all stainless post boil.
the copper is supposed to add nutrients for a healthy fermentation.

I was wondering if any one had any comments or thoughts about this.
 
I also feel that a modest amount of copper equipment in contact with the wort is an important feature that all breweries should have. There is a report from a brewery that converted to all stainless equipment from a copper kettle and immediately started to have fermentation problems. They resolved it by incorporating a length of copper tubing in the wort circuit to add a bit of copper to the wort. I now tell my professional brewing clients that they should add a bit of copper to their system too. Just a short length of copper tube in the kettle is all that is needed. It doesn't need to be hooked to anything. Its just there to add copper ions to the wort.
 
Copper is a co factor for many yeast enzymes - mostly those that are involved in respiration but it also improves fermentation performance of yeast. OTOH it is toxic in excess so only very small quantities are wanted. Guys used to throw a few pennies into the kettle and that was effective in the days when pennies were made of copper and they still are but it is a thin layer of plating over zinc. Therefore, hanging a piece or 2 of stripped copper wire (10 or 12 gauge) over the edge of the kettle may be a more practical means of getting a little copper into the wort. Certainly easier to fish out. Use of an immersion wort chiller would certainly get some copper into solution. In my rig the steam coils are copper so I get plenty that way.
 
My old RIMS was all copper and probably had about 2 ft of 1/2" and 2" copper tubing. I now have an all stainless RIMS and about 2 ft of 1/4" copper tubing that serves as the wort outlet tube in my kettle. That seems to be enough. I don't think there is much worry with excess copper in wort since all copper kettles used to be normal equipment in brewing.

By the way, copper is an important factor in reducing sulfurous compounds in the finished beer. If you are having eggy or sulfurous odors, add copper into the system to add ions.

I've thought about using a penny to supply zinc in wort since they are reported by the Mint to be virtually all zinc. Is the copper alloyed into the metal or is it just a copper plating? My understanding is that its alloyed into the metal, but I've never filed off an edge of a penny to see if it has another color underneath the surface.
 
I have always been a big fan of using copper. Not only does it act as a cofactor in many enzymatic processes for yeast, as mentioned by ajdelange, it is naturally antibacterial as well.
 
mabrungard said:
Is the copper alloyed into the metal or is it just a copper plating? My understanding is that its alloyed into the metal, but I've never filed off an edge of a penny to see if it has another color underneath the surface.
Click to expand...

It is plated. You can file the edge of a penny to expose the zinc, then immerse the penny in a strong acid and dissolve out the zinc core. You get pretty cool thin penny shell.
 
nutty_gnome said:
Now that is pretty neat! What acid would you suggest to try that at home?
Click to expand...

Hydrochloric acid. It is commonly sold as Muriatic acid at hardware stores or swimming pool supply shops for pool pH adjusting.

Do this outside, as the fumes (although just hydrogen gas) are rancid.
 
The core is an alloy of mostly zinc (above 98%) but there is a wee bit of copper in it as well. But much of the copper is plated onto the core.

In beer sulfides (jungbuket) are usually sufficiently removed by scrubbing during conditioning. However in the wine business the finished product is often conveyed to the bottling area via a copper chute for just this purpose.
 
Sounds like fabricating a kettle drain pick up out of copper tubing will be a good thing as I build my next kettle. I almost bought a new stainless drain unit, but since I have plenty of 1/2" copper in my plumbing stash, copper is it!
 
Here is a very good podcast on "The Boil". If memory serves me correctly Jeremy Raub, head brewer @ Eagle Rock Brewery speaks in-depth about the positive aspects of having copper in the boil and its effect on yeast health.
 
ColoHox said:
nutty_gnome said:
Now that is pretty neat! What acid would you suggest to try that at home?
Click to expand...

My take on that would be that if you have to ask that question you don't know enough about chemistry to be fiddling with strong acids. That said there are 2 sources of acid which would be suitable: hydrochloric from the hardware store and sulfuric from the auto parts store.

In particular do not use nitric as it will dissolve away the copper too.

ColoHox said:
Hydrochloric acid. It is commonly sold as Muriatic acid at hardware stores or swimming pool supply shops for pool pH adjusting.

Do this outside, as the fumes (although just hydrogen gas) are rancid.
Click to expand...

The sharp smelling component of the fumes is hydrogen chloride gas. Muriatic acid is nothing more than HCl dissolved in water. At room temperature the partial pressure of HCl gas over a 28% HCl solution is about the same as the vapor pressure of water i.e. 10 mm/Hg or 0.01 atm. When you inhale some of that it dissolves in the water in your lungs to form hydrochloric acid again. Ouch.
Click to expand...
 
ajdelange said:
My take on that would be that if you have to ask that question you don't know enough about chemistry to be fiddling with strong acids.
Click to expand...

At-home chemistry experiments are the best! Homebrewers do at-home chemistry every time they brew. If muriatic acid is scary, you can dissolve salt into vinegar and achieve a weak acid still usable in this experiment.

ajdelange said:
The sharp smelling component of the fumes is hydrogen chloride gas. Muriatic acid is nothing more than HCl dissolved in water. At room temperature the partial pressure of HCl gas over a 28% HCl solution is about the same as the vapor pressure of water i.e. 10 mm/Hg or 0.01 atm. When you inhale some of that it dissolves in the water in your lungs to form hydrochloric acid again. Ouch.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't this be the case if we were dealing with pure hydrogen chloride? As the hydrogen chloride is already dissociated in water (becoming hydrochloric acid), the chloride ion reacts with the Zn leaving H2 gas when a penny is involved.

Either way, it's probably not good to deeply sniff the surface of any acid:drunk:.
 
ColoHox said:
At-home chemistry experiments are the best! Homebrewers do at-home chemistry every time they brew. If muriatic acid is scary, you can dissolve salt into vinegar and achieve a weak acid still usable in this experiment.



Wouldn't this be the case if we were dealing with pure hydrogen chloride? As the hydrogen chloride is already dissociated in water (becoming hydrochloric acid), the chloride ion reacts with the Zn leaving H2 gas when a penny is involved.

Either way, it's probably not good to deeply sniff the surface of any acid:drunk:.
Click to expand...

Having handled both solid form and liquid form of all types of acids both highly concentrated and weak for a hazardous waste disposal company, I can safely say that the only compound available to the public that I'm afraid of is Hydrofluoric Acid or HF. HCl is super strong and does give off an odor, but it is safe if handled with care and gloves. HF is no joke and unlike HCl it doesn't attack your skin, but rather it has the nasty habit of leaching through your pores and going straight for the calcium and magnesium in your bones. It also attacks silicates and can't be stored in glass. Anyways, I digress. HCl in liquid form, while considered to be the strongest acid, it is actually rather safe to handle and we encountered it on just about every lab cleanout or industrial site we ever got called to. Being a labpack chemist was pretty rad, but it is a dirty, nasty job with long hours and low pay. It also forced me to be on the road 3-4 nights a week and put my homebrewing completely on hold. Now I'm back in the office and miserable, but I get to go home, sleep in my own bed and brew beer, so I can't complain.:off:
 
ColoHox said:
At-home chemistry experiments are the best! Homebrewers do at-home chemistry every time they brew. If muriatic acid is scary, you can dissolve salt into vinegar and achieve a weak acid still usable in this experiment.
Click to expand...

This brought back memories of childhood Gilbert chemistry sets (yes, I was born before the nanny state arose) which used sodium bisulfate (not bisulfite) as a source of acid. This is, even today, considered GRAS (generally regarded as safe) and, in water solution, produces a fairly low pH (1-2) i.e. it's pretty acidic.



ColoHox said:
Wouldn't this be the case if we were dealing with pure hydrogen chloride? As the hydrogen chloride is already dissociated in water (becoming hydrochloric acid), the chloride ion reacts with the Zn leaving H2 gas when a penny is involved.
Click to expand...

Don't want to be too pedantic but the chloride is just along for the ride. It is zinc metal which gives up its two outer shell electrons to a pair of hydrogen ions from the dissociated acid

2HCl + 2H2O + Zn --> 2H3O+ + 2Cl- + Zn++ -->

H2 + 2Cl- + 2 H2O + Zn++
 
I don't mean to hijack this thread, but this seems relevant: what is an ideal hot-side exposure time for copper?

My places of copper:
- When I make starter wort for pressure canning, I tend to do it in the kitchen with leftover 2row. I use my old immersion copper coil for the setup convenience to chill the wort; it's sanitized by boiling in the kettle for 15 minutes prior to chilling. (This leaves behind a lot of hot and cold break before canning) In hindsight, this copper is probably good for a culturing medium.
- For normal brewdays, I have a counterflow plate chiller, 304 stainless and copper. Depending on the season, I chill flowing near-boil in the kettle, to pitching temps on the outlet of the chiller, so the copper exposure time is minimal, but I imagine the hot wort is exposed to a large area for that period.

Are those two pieces combined sufficient? I'm not experiencing fermentation issues per se, but I'd want to know if I'm deficient somewhere where a risk-reducer is as simple as affixing a small piece of copper somewhere to my kettle (say, end of diptube).
 
In my mash tun I have a homemade stainless mesh strainer...inside is a pigtail made from copper wire to keep it from collapsing. Also my HLT dip tube is copper. I hope that's enough...both are pre-boil...good to read here this makes sense.
 
Just an update

I got rid of some of my stainless lines in my mash rims tubing and replaced it with copper pipe

so copper pipe is all pre-boil.

the last few batches since copper being added back. I have got a few more points attenuation 2-4 while mashing at the same temperature as before 152*.

the batch I keged today was from 1.052 to 1.008 with Notty

apparent attenuation of 83.9%

I am convinced the copper is helping.
 

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