Float Tank usage

[cactusgarrett]

Saw this on reddit and I thought I'd pose the question here. I'm genuinely curious but no one with experience is chiming in to that post:

"I've been poring over all things German lager lately, and info from Bierstadt in this article has me curious:

If you'd like to mimic Bierstadt's use of a float tank, knockout into a fermenter, pitch your yeast and then 12 hours later transfer your beer into a new fermentation vessel, leaving behind about 1c of wort from the bottom. This helps clarify the beer and leave some of the weaker yeast behind.

This is the first I've heard of mimicking a Float Tank on the homebrew level, so I dug deeper. According to this article, the traditional use is to bubble up air through the new wort:

As the flotation air is dispersed in the wort...[it] forms small bubbles in the wort, to which cold-trub particles cling. As the bubbles float to the surface, they drag the attached trub particles with them. At the top of the wort, the bubbles coalesce into a brown, firm, and compact layer of foam. As time passes, this head of foam may even dry out and become crusty. Once the beer starts fermenting, however, the liquid is racked out from under the trub-laden foam head, leaving the unwanted sediment behind. If the flotation tank is open, the foam layer may also be carefully skimmed off by hand.

I've been a staunch opponent of unnecessarily using secondary vessels, but with the above in mind, the process info from Ashleigh Carter appears too vague in order to achieve the goal of mimicking a float tank. She says to "transfer your beer into a new fermentation vessel", but it doesn't say how. For example, I've got a SS Brewbucket with a ball valve toward to bottom of the cone. Would it suffice to just dump the trub that has accumulated at the cone after 12 hours? Or is the idea to separate the beer from the foam at the top - as the Beer & Brewing article suggests? They even suggest skimming."

 

[day_trippr]

The LODO guys would have meltdown over this

 

[alastairblake]

Saw this on reddit and I thought I'd pose the question here. I'm genuinely curious but no one with experience is chiming in to that post:

"I've been poring over all things German lager lately, and info from Bierstadt in this article has me curious:


This is the first I've heard of mimicking a Float Tank on the homebrew level, so I dug deeper. According to this article, the traditional use is to bubble up air through the new wort:


I've been a staunch opponent of unnecessarily using secondary vessels, but with the above in mind, the process info from Ashleigh Carter appears too vague in order to achieve the goal of mimicking a float tank. She says to "transfer your beer into a new fermentation vessel", but it doesn't say how. For example, I've got a SS Brewbucket with a ball valve toward to bottom of the cone. Would it suffice to just dump the trub that has accumulated at the cone after 12 hours? Or is the idea to separate the beer from the foam at the top - as the Beer & Brewing article suggests? They even suggest skimming."

did you ever end up giving something like this a try? I am debating it myself.

 

[alastairblake]

The LODO guys would have meltdown over this

I think there would be ways to do this that are more LODO than others. not to mention that you NEED to give the yeast oxygen at some point to have them be healthy.

 

[ihavenonickname]

I’m thinking about giving this a go. My thinking is the priority is to leave behind true and inactive yeast. So I’m gonna let the yeast be active for sure 24 hours given how active my yeast usually is and then use a floating dip tube to transfer it to a new keg fermenter. I could see this cleaning up the flavor a bit.

But yeah, I don’t see the difference between this idea and dumping the cold trub from the bottom of a conical

 

[a_brewer]

Hey there, I'm the head brewer of a brewery in the PNW. Stumbled upon this thread while researching implementing a flotation tank in our brewery, like what Bierstadt has. The substitute for her flotation tank is actually more mimicking what some breweries call a sedimentation tank. The goal being to separate out the Cold Break, more protein and polyphenols that don't come out during your Hot Break while boiling but break out when you cool the wort down after boiling. You don't find a lot of American breweries using either type of vessel. But being able to remove the Cold Break from fermentation really helps with yeast health, better beer clarity, head retention, and cleaner flavor. If you have a conical fermenter you can definitely just dump the Break off the bottom. I know plenty of Breweries around Seattle that do that. Getting rid of both Cold Break and Dead yeast.