Hey everyone, looking for a bit of general advice.
We have a sweet homebrew comp on at the moment in New Zealand. The idea is that the commercial craft brewer gives out the actual recipe for one of their beers and the homebrewers have to clone it. Then at judging, all the beers are lined up (including the original) and the commercial brewer has to pick which one is their original out of the lineup. If they accidentally pick your clone instead of the original, you get sweet prizes. We have 5 weeks until judging.
So I'm brewing my IPA clone tomorrow and got a real bottle for "research" purposes and was surprised to see it's bottle conditioned. I was gonna pressure ferment this in a corny since that gets me good results, it's fast, and I can get really low levels of oxidation using my process. But I'm now thinking I should be bottle conditioning this since that's what they do. 5 weeks is doable if I stick to a good schedule.
Since I'm entering multiple categories I can't leave this in primary longer than a week - I need the primary for the next batch. But I could closed transfer to a purged keg, do the dryhopping / crash cooling / fining in the keg (still uncarbed at this point). Then bottle with a bottling gun to avoid oxdation racking into a bottling bucket and using priming drops for carbonation.
Would that be a workable plan for minimal oxygen exposure?
We have a sweet homebrew comp on at the moment in New Zealand. The idea is that the commercial craft brewer gives out the actual recipe for one of their beers and the homebrewers have to clone it. Then at judging, all the beers are lined up (including the original) and the commercial brewer has to pick which one is their original out of the lineup. If they accidentally pick your clone instead of the original, you get sweet prizes. We have 5 weeks until judging.
So I'm brewing my IPA clone tomorrow and got a real bottle for "research" purposes and was surprised to see it's bottle conditioned. I was gonna pressure ferment this in a corny since that gets me good results, it's fast, and I can get really low levels of oxidation using my process. But I'm now thinking I should be bottle conditioning this since that's what they do. 5 weeks is doable if I stick to a good schedule.
Since I'm entering multiple categories I can't leave this in primary longer than a week - I need the primary for the next batch. But I could closed transfer to a purged keg, do the dryhopping / crash cooling / fining in the keg (still uncarbed at this point). Then bottle with a bottling gun to avoid oxdation racking into a bottling bucket and using priming drops for carbonation.
Would that be a workable plan for minimal oxygen exposure?
