Aerate Wort

[mmlipps]

How do you go about aerating your wort, I'm still at the beginner phase and I just shake up the carboy before I add the yeast. What are other ways? I see pumps and such online, is that really necessary for a 5 gal batch?


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[poptarts]

dump the yeast in and shake and or stir the crap out of it. I might be wrong but I believe if you pitch proper amounts of yeast aeration is pretty much not necessary unless your doing high OG batches.

 

[dstranger99]

^

Same here, just shake the hell out of it, then it'll do it's own thang.......

 

[Doed]

When I started I did the same thing, shake the carboy then pitch the yeast. I then moved to a degasser wand and used a battery drill to run it. It basically whips the wort adding oxygen. This worked okay and was way better then the shaking. I have since moved on to adding pure oxygen using an oxygen stone off of a disposable oxygen tank. The yeast tends to finish at a lower final gravity now using pure oxygen.

 

[Doongie]

I pour from boiling kettle into the fermenter through a sieve. Pretty easy with a large (10" stainless) sieve in to my bucket, but can be managed with a small sieve and funnel for a carboy neck.

 

[fartinmartin]

I let it go from the boil kettle to the FV from a great height, loads of bubbles and turbulence (like a cab horse pissing in the old mill stream) it's done the job for me for years and years.

 

[LandoLincoln]

It depends on the OG. If you have a really big beer, like 1.080 or higher, you really would be best served getting a pure oxygen tank and a regulator and a stainless steel aeration stone. That setup will cost you about 60 bucks.

If your beer is smaller than that, you can get away with taking the bucket or carboy and vigorously sloshing it around for 90 seconds.

Some people use air pumps and air filters that use ambient air, but studies have shown that those methods are pretty poor compared to just sloshing the wort around.

See attached.

 

[Foosier]

I just used a large restaurant style wire whisk to aerate a big triple while cooling. Whipped the wort into a froth while cooling then transferred it to the fermenter. After pitching a huge starter it seems to have finished in 8 days. Not saying Oxygen wouldn't be better, however I would caution that you can get by without it. (Granted, in a Belgian where you expect some funky flavors and phenols this may be better than in an IIPA.)

 

[wobdee]

I aerate in the kettle while I cool down with my IC. I stir the crap out of it and it froths up close to the rim sometimes.

 

[dobe12]

There is a great article in the latest Zymurgy about this exact topic. If I remember correctly, pure O2 is best, followed by shaking for a few minutes. Using a wine degasser (which I used to use) doesn't do that good of a job and pouring from one vessel to another did a very poor job.... all according to their reported study results.

I was actually shocked that shaking the primary did such a good job. Better than all other options sans pure O2.

 

[Husher]

I fill my bottling bucket with wort and have it drop into a fermenting pail (or use a hose to route to a carboy). the drop aerates the wort effortlessly, and also drops the temp by a degree or two.

 

[nicklepickles]

I toss it back and forth between a couple sanitized buckets. Takes about 5 minutes for super frothy wort, and good exercise as well

 

[BikeAndBrew]

I now use bottled oxygen, but before I had that I used two different approaches:

1) Used the wife's hand mixer (like you use for baking a cake) with the whisk attachment.

2) Bought the cheapest handheld whisk I could find (I think like $2 at Walmart), pinched the end down with some pliers, and put it in my cordless drill. This worked really well for stirring the wort and I could build up a huge layer of foam in a very short time period with no effort.

I made many batches using the above techniques and they all turned out just fine.

 

[ncbrewer]

I dip a 2 cup measuring cup into it and pour back in from about a foot above. Keep this up for a few minutes. I do a split boil, so there's only 2-1/2 gallons in each pot. It might not work as well for a single 5 gallon pot/bucket since the aeration activity stays fairly close to the surface.

 

[Bigbeavk]

I just dunk the copper chilling coil in and out while I'm chilling it down to room temp and it does a fine job. I've never had any issues reaching FG no matter what the OG was. 1.12 was the highest OG I had on a Barleywine and it was down to 1.02 within a week.