Sous Vide Brewing - 2 Pints

[HardyFool]

Hello everyone!

I was intrigued a few years back by a thread in which someone used an Anova Sous Vide Precision Cooker as a pseudo-RIMS for mash control; the idea was to use a chinois or hop strainer to create a grain-free zone in the mash tun, in which the cooker was placed. Some noted that this probably created a local hot spot, though perhaps by separately recirculating the wort through a false bottom, this could be fixed.

In any case, the idea struck me, and since my normal gear is out of commission while I convert it into an all-electric setup, I decided to have some fun and brew a quart of beer. Specifically, two beers: a Dark Mild and a Helles Lager (fermented with White Labs' High Pressure Lager yeast in a 1L PET bottle with a Spunding Valve).

Here are pictures of the process, and some observations:

• Instead of proper Sous Vide vacuum bags, use Ziploc gallon bags; they're easier to seal, which avoids the air pocket problem I ran into when trying to seal the vacuum bags while full of liquid. I used two bags in order to avoid leaks (in and of themselves unlikely)
• When mashing in, it's easiest to secure the Ziploc to the inside of a 1 gallon bucket and use that as a "manifold" in which to add first the water, then the malt
• Side note: I didn't add any salts, but you could easily get accurate enough measurements with a .01g scale, available for $15 and a good thing to have if you wish to brew 1 gallon batches
• The Sous Vide held mash temps, presumably, very well, but I had efficiency issues with the Helles Lager, for which I employed step mashes of ~122˚, 148˚, and 156˚ (something like that), which may have resulted from simply too little time allowed for the mash temp to ramp up (some 30 minutes per step once the water bath was at temp)
• Boiling is easy and straightforward; have some bottled water on hand for topping up
• Chilling is fast enough in an ice water bath
• When pitching yeast, it may be wise to transfer your slurry to a cylindrical flask in order to dole out, say, 10 Billion cells (10% of a super fresh pack), or simply pitch dry yeast to arbitrary accuracy
• You'll obviously have to rig up your own fermenter; I used a PET bottle with a Ball Lock adapter and Spunding Valve, and a plastic 1 qt pail, and both seem to be working well

The Spunded beer is at ~8psi (goal: 15), and that may be due to a slight leak, which I have yet to suss out despite repeated attempts, while the Mild shows some activity, though as it's a ~3% beer, I don't expect wild uproarious activity

And that's about it! If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them

Cheers!

 

[CascadesBrewer]

Sounds like a terrible idea...I like it!

Actually, I think the idea of using a spunding valve kinda makes this practical (with the downfall that you need one for each batch) and could be applied to a 1L or larger bottle. Brew day is dirt simple, set it aside and ferment, then cold crash for a few days and enjoy without the hassle of bottling. I do a number of 2.5 gal batches to try out recipes/yeasts and 1 gal batches to try out hops. This takes the same concepts down to a single serving.

I don't quite get the use of the bag. You add the measured grain and water to the bag and then put that in a pot of water for the mash? What did you use to filter out the grain? I have a few large hop sacks that I could use for small scale BIAB.

 

[HardyFool]

I'm glad you like it! And yeah, ultimately I view this as something I'd only really do if I had no time to brew, and were fine with sub-fantastic results. The hands-off element is a big part of the pitch, though I view this as way more of a think piece than a legitimate idea

Actually, I think the idea of using a spunding valve kinda makes this practical (with the downfall that you need one for each batch) and could be applied to a 1L or larger bottle.

An excellent point, and for another wild idea I had, I came up with the idea of a "pressure grant" when using the Spunding Valve - to that end, the real solution for mass batching would be to "tie" the gas sides of these fermenters (read: CarbCaps) to the liquid port of a small keg (I have a 1.5 gal one for example) using perhaps a standard distribution manifold, and then spunding the output of that keg. Alternatively, you could run this backwards and pressurize the "pressure grant" if you had a slight but persistent leak, or swap the spunding valve for a CO2 tank to boost the pressure back up, etc. But that's just crazy

I don't quite get the use of the bag. You add the measured grain and water to the bag and then put that in a pot of water for the mash? What did you use to filter out the grain? I have a few large hop sacks that I could use for small scale BIAB.

So you could in theory do what others have done and bag up the grains in, say, a muslin bag, and then sous vide the surrounding wort; because I don't exactly trust the food-grade-ness of the Sous Vide heater (it's probably fine, but technically not intended for direct contact with food), I used it as it's intended: put steak (or here, mash components) in a bag, and use the conduction of heat from the water bath as a heat source (like an insulated cooler whose temp you can choose, or even like a steam-jacketed mash tun).

After that, pictured below, I opened the Ziplocks, and just strained the contents through a muslin bag, as if that's what I had mashed in all along. Your efficiency should be as it is with BIAB; I got something like 70-75% for the Dark Mild. You could strain it any number of ways, I just felt like anything more wasn't worth the effort.

 

[HardyFool]

A more interesting idea, applicable to a real system, would be to use the Sous Vide heater like a HERMS heater, and use it to heat your strike water, HERMS-heat your mash, and then sparge your mash. Hell, due to the low power requirements of pumps, you could use the same InkBird controller you already use for powering your fermentation chamber to reasonably accurately control the flow of wort through the HERMS coil, either by tee-ing in a thermowell to your pump path, or just by dropping the probe directly into your mash somewhere (not bad, not great)

If you're still reading, let's take this further: get a stainless wort chiller, submerge that directly into your mash, and use a reasonably powerful sous vide cooker (say, 1500W minimum) to heat your HERMS water, which you then pump through the coil submerged in the mash tun to maintain (but likely not be able to raise) the temperature (what I call the Reverse-HERMS) and later sparge with; you can then use that coil later to cool your wort, by pumping your wort through the coil, which is in turn submerged in an ice bath, saving you the need to buy almost anything in order to have a functioning HERMS-like setup; all that's needed are a pump and a decent Sous Vide heater, in addition to your coil wort chiller.

Though a counterflow chiller would, hilariously, work just the same, by pumping your water through the normal water port. As would a plate chiller, were you careful enough about recirculating the wort til clear, and installed a pre-filter inline!

 

[HardyFool]

Progress! The Helles has been carbonated. The carbonation was quick and simple, though the beer was plagued by two issues: a substantial quantity of DME had to be used to hit gravity due to a surprisingly poor efficiency (see above for thoughts), and I had serious issues keeping pressure (more or less unrelated to the scale, since I use the same spunding valve for larger beers, though the very small volume of CO2 the liquid could hold meant small leaks became unconquerable, and the ability of the beer to hold pressure while slowly off-gassing to mitigate problems was crippled).

The Mild holds more promise, as that was brewed "without tricks" - bottling comes in two days, results in two weeks

 

[johngg123]

You know I looked at my Anova sous vide the other day and I thought that is just a inkbird controller with a bucket heater and an immersion blender to prevent temp stratification. Props to you! There are a million reasons to make ultra small batches, who wants 5 gallons of experimental crap!

 

[HardyFool]

You know I looked at my Anova sous vide the other day and I thought that is just a inkbird controller with a bucket heater and an immersion blender to prevent temp stratification. Props to you! There are a million reasons to make ultra small batches, who wants 5 gallons of experimental crap!

Haha thank you!! And yeah, as mentioned, I'm building/refining an electric brewing setup at the moment, and it often strikes me that I'm building what amounts to a large sous vide, where the pump, heating element, and temp controller happen to be physically separate. Hell, I've often thought of using a ~quart "grant" with a sous vide in it as a very literally Sous Vide RIMS system.

But absolutely, re: 5 gallons of trash, you could easily kettle sour with this method (mash, cool to 100˚, pitch, hold for a day, boil, ferment), and thus try out any number of bacterial sources very quickly and easily (that is, beyond just divvying up a 1-5 gallon batch; even so, you could hold any number of bags of wort at temp with a single sous vide, especially at low temp which bleeds hardly and energy into the environment, making it pretty darn efficient)