nhaulrik
New Member
Hi fellow brewers.
I have been a long time reader of this forum, and this is my first post here. Being a dane means that English is not my native language, so please bare with me if anything sounds strange!
I am part of a small amateur brewery where me and a group of friends recently decided to scale up our production and equipment. We have gone from two smaller grainfather-like pots to a production capacitity of 500 litres. We are not the most experienced brewers, and our investment is driven by our passion to the craft and the joy of doing something fun together.
Going from smaller scale equipment to this has of course yielded a lot of questions and challenges. We have recently brewed an APA, which tasted excellent when it came out of the fermenter, but after bottling it rapidly lost its' hop aroma and character. This was noticable already after two weeks. We are still discussing what could be the cause, and one of my concerns is about oxydation and the stainless steel bottle filler that we use. I have tried illustrating my concerns below, and was hoping some of you great folks might have an opinion or even some advice for improvement.
As illustrated, the beer is pumped directly from the fermenter into the filling machine's chamber. This is done using an electrical pump and the beer is not exposed to air during this process. However when the beer enters the filling machine it goes into a chamber with a volume of approximately 5 litres. This chamber is not sealed and holes allow air to be in contact with the beer. The beer is then transferred to the bottles via the three steel rods as displayed. I estimate that the beer is exposed for a couple of minutes in the chamber where it also undergo a bit of stirring caused by the pump, before it goes into the bottle. The beer is capped immediately after being filled.
My concern is whether this exposure to air is enough to oxydize the beer. We have discussed this heavily but we have yet to come up with a solution or even a suggestion for improvement. Do you any of you have experience with a similar device, or maybe have some suggestion of what is going wrong?
The hops used for the brew were fresh, sealed in a vacuum pouch and stored in the fridge. So I do not expect the hops to be the issue.
I have been a long time reader of this forum, and this is my first post here. Being a dane means that English is not my native language, so please bare with me if anything sounds strange!
I am part of a small amateur brewery where me and a group of friends recently decided to scale up our production and equipment. We have gone from two smaller grainfather-like pots to a production capacitity of 500 litres. We are not the most experienced brewers, and our investment is driven by our passion to the craft and the joy of doing something fun together.
Going from smaller scale equipment to this has of course yielded a lot of questions and challenges. We have recently brewed an APA, which tasted excellent when it came out of the fermenter, but after bottling it rapidly lost its' hop aroma and character. This was noticable already after two weeks. We are still discussing what could be the cause, and one of my concerns is about oxydation and the stainless steel bottle filler that we use. I have tried illustrating my concerns below, and was hoping some of you great folks might have an opinion or even some advice for improvement.
As illustrated, the beer is pumped directly from the fermenter into the filling machine's chamber. This is done using an electrical pump and the beer is not exposed to air during this process. However when the beer enters the filling machine it goes into a chamber with a volume of approximately 5 litres. This chamber is not sealed and holes allow air to be in contact with the beer. The beer is then transferred to the bottles via the three steel rods as displayed. I estimate that the beer is exposed for a couple of minutes in the chamber where it also undergo a bit of stirring caused by the pump, before it goes into the bottle. The beer is capped immediately after being filled.
My concern is whether this exposure to air is enough to oxydize the beer. We have discussed this heavily but we have yet to come up with a solution or even a suggestion for improvement. Do you any of you have experience with a similar device, or maybe have some suggestion of what is going wrong?
The hops used for the brew were fresh, sealed in a vacuum pouch and stored in the fridge. So I do not expect the hops to be the issue.
