Hot Side Aeration

I have lots of hot side aeration in my current setup-- I use a single tear system w/ no pump. So I spigot out of my HLT and MLT to a pot and then dump that pot into the Boil Kettle. It seems to work out well for me so far, but I wonder what the Hot Side Aeration effects are.

The reason it hasn't bothered me is that I heard on Basic Brewing Radio that on the homebrewing scale, it really doesn't make much of a difference.

So my questions are:

1) Is this really affecting my beer?

2) Any suggestions on how to cut down the aeration w/o spending a ton of money right now?

Everything I've read leans to the side that HSA is more of a feared myth for homebrewers. Unless your beer tastes like cardboard, I wouldnt worry. One simple solution would be to get a heat resistant hose from your MLT to the boil pot.

HSA, another bogeyman for homebrewers....another thing that made the leap from commercial breweries of tastless lager that has to have a long shelf life and absolutely no flavor (good or bad) otherwise.

Hot-side aeration can be demonstrated in medium and large commercial breweries because the brewing equipment is so big that splashing is a really dramatic event. Think of liquid flowing through a six-inch pipe at 400 gallons per minute and cascading 12 feet through the air before hitting the bottom of a tank.

But to the home brewer it's only a bogeyman....If you wanna worry about it then get a long enough hose from your mlt to your brew kettle, and drain slowly. Just like moving from the fermenter to the bottling bucket or in bottling, you want to fill your kettle from the bottom to the top, so make sure your hose reaches the bottom.

You'll prolly want to skip the pot dumping and redesign your system so you're filling your brew kettle directly from your mashtun.

Or you can just RDWHAHB

I love the quote about the Basic Brewing experiments on Maltybrew.com

Hot-side aeration…myth?

I listened to a great podcast from Basic Brewing Radio yesterday on hot-side aeration. Everyone seems to debate whether or not this is a concern for homebrewing. The podcast covers an experiment done by some homebrewers in Austin where they try hard to cause HSA in a small batch.

I was never too concerned about HSA in my brewing and now I think I’m even less concerned.

Click to expand...

Sounds good-- I think I'll just keep going about my business w/ the pot until I can afford a pump. I'd buy some tubing, but it won't gravity feed over...