I wish there was a detailed step by step guide to conducting a five gallon LODO brew. If there is would someone tell me where plz?
Sure. I’ll take a stab at it. There are a lot of old posts about low oxygen brewing, and the German Brewers forum online has quite a few links to good information. Many of the links are dead however. Don’t know why, above my paygrade. Unfortunately, the individual who was the defacto resident authority is no longer a participant on this forum, for whatever reason. The articles and the data you’ll come across can get pretty deep, pretty fast. There’s also some silly notions on both sides of the issue that are strongly held pro and con that has caused unnecessary controversy to a topic that shouldn’t be controversial (or adversarial). Sad. We’re just here to talk about making better beer. With that disclosure…..
I’m guessing you don’t want a Doctoral Dissertation. You’re looking for some Cliff Notes on low oxygen brewing, so let me give you my Low Down on LoDO for Dummies Like Me. I started down this path nearly two years ago from a thread and some post on this website. The ideas struck a chord with me so I started incorporating processes a little at a time to see how it worked, but equally important
if it worked. As to the “how”, I found most processes easy to incorporate into my work flow. As to “if”, my conclusion was, “Yes, it does.” I’m not an evangelical convert who strictly follows protocols but rather a practitioner who found value in adopting some methods that blend in well with my goals and existing gear. After a few fits and starts, as well as back tracking from some dead ends, here’s what I do:
Night Before: Treat strike water. I de-oxygenate the water in my mash vessel (20L Braumeister all-in-one) with a method known as yeast oxygen scavenging (YOS) that involves adding one gram each of corn sugar and bread yeast per gallon of water pre-heated to about 95F (10 gals. water treated with 20 grams corn sugar/yeast mixture). Turn off the heat, sprinkle the mixture, cover the pot, go to bed. The yeast will consume virtually all the dissolved oxygen in the water in less than an hour, and keep it D.O.-free for up to a week.
Brew Day - Mash: Begin heating strike water, add brewing salts, crush grains. Don’t worry about the water. It will appear milky-white and cloudy from the yeast. The yeast will be denatured by the time the strike water reaches about 130~140F, and the ‘leftovers’ will remain in the grain bed following the mash. Just before dough-in I add ~2 grams of Trifecta blend of ascorbic acid, NaMeta, and BrewTan B which acts as an antioxidant to sequester any O2 that might otherwise get reabsorbed by the mash water during the mash and pre-boil transfer to the boil vessel. Then, dough-in and mash as usual. I’ve gone to full volume mash/no sparge for all lagers to avoid unnecessary splashing after the mash out. I’m not as concerned with ales, and I’ll usually “sparge” the grain bed in a separate bucket and top-off my pre-boil if the volume comes up short. But lagers are no sparge.
Brew Day - Boil: The only changes here are to only maintain a gentle boil rather than a vigorous roiling boil. Don’t worry, the DMS will boil off anyway. I also skim the hot break (“Oh, HORRORS!”). The DMS
still boils off. Add hops on schedule. Near the end of boil I add another dosing of Trifecta (usually 1~1.5 grams). It does two things: additional antioxidant protection that carries over into the transfer to the fermenter, and the precipitation of various things floating around in the boil. It also lowers the pH slightly. At the end of boil, chill quickly. The only dispensation to LoDO here is the use of a stainless steel immersion coil instead of copper. Copper is only marginally better at heat transference than stainless, but copper can and will introduce oxides into the chilling wort. Once below 70C I’ll whirlpool and/or hop stand for about :20 minutes. You’ll be astounded at how clear the wort is from, I assume, the Trifecta.
Brew Day - Fermentation: I drain the wort from the bottom of the boil vessel and do a closed transfer with a March pump backwards through the transfer port on my sealed conical fermenter. The dip tube in the fermenter is positioned slightly below parallel with the ground, so the flow imparts a secondary whirlpool inside the fermenter. After transfer is complete I connect the glycol lines and chill the wort to slightly below my desired fermentation temperature. This helps to further settle any suspended solids that remain after the secondary whirlpool. Since the transfer was into a sealed fermenter and the chilled wort has some “carry-over” protection from the Trifecta, I’ll let it sit for an hour or two before pitching the yeast. It gives me time to do some cleanup from the brew day. Then I’ll dump out some settled trub through the bottom dump valve (usually 1~3 liters), then pitch my yeast, THEN oxygenate the wort, provided I’m using a liquid yeast. Dry yeast doesn’t need oxygenation. Let the wort free rise to fermentation temperature, set the controller, and let Mother Fermentation do her thing.
During Fermentation: While the yeasties are busy converting the various sugars into alcohol and CO2, I’ll clean any dirty kegs with PBW followed by a StarSan soak. After a day or so I’ll drain the StarSan and fill the keg to the very brim to overflowing with hot water and ~5 grams of NaMeta. When high krausen has passed, I hook up the blow-off line of the fermenter to the gas-in post on the NaMeta sanitized/de-oxygenated keg. A discharge line is attached to the liquid out post of the keg. The CO2 being released from the fermenter empties the NaMeta water out of the keg. If you have multiple kegs to clean, you can daisy chain them together to save chemicals. Once the liquid has been purged out by the CO2 discharge from the active fermentation, the kegs will be cleaned, sanitized and O2 purged with pure CO2.
Post-Fermentation and Packaging: I’ve gotten away from primary/secondary fermentations and now just do a single stage ferment. Usually it takes 5-7 days for ales and 10-14 days for lagers to ferment, though some ale yeasts are somewhat faster. Once I’m within 5 points of my expected final gravity I attach a spunding valve set to roughly 1 atm/14.7 psig and raise the temperature to 69~70F for both lagers and ales for several days until a stable FG is reached. Then I’ll cold crash to around 35F. Since the beer is pressurized and carbonated, there’s no worries with suck back. After a few days at a stable 35F I can rack to a serving keg in a closed transfer under pressure for conditioning and lagering. I set the pressure on the CO2 regulator to the pressure that matches the desired CO2 volumes for the 38F temperature of my beer fridge and serving kegerator. If I’m lucky, the only O2 exposure my beer gets is the trace amount that’s found in the industrial grade CO2 bottled gas used for transfer and serving.
Soup to nuts, that’s my process. With only a few notable exceptions, the procedures aren’t a whole lot different than what I was doing before I went Loco for LoDO. Many of the steps were integrated over time as I migrated out of plastic and into stainless steel, so nothing really seemed like a radical change at the time. It’s been more evolution than revolution, adding new gear and new methods along the way. But the collective result has been better beer, validated with more ribbons. This is where I am today, which is no guarantee that it’s where I’ll be tomorrow. I remain open to better ways to improve my process
and my product.
Cheers.
Edit: Oops my bad. Didn't stop to realize that I'd gotten so far off topic. Apologies to all. Mods please feel free to move as appropriate.
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