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Has anyone come across a method to filter the 0.1% O2 out of standard grade CO2? Is it even possible?
 
schematix said:
Has anyone come across a method to filter the 0.1% O2 out of standard grade CO2? Is it even possible?
Click to expand...

Here is a purifier that I've come across before. Its pricey at $215.00. Says it'll last 4 tanks, but didn't list the size of those tanks.

http://co2purifier.com/vici-metronics-co2-purifier/

"VICI Metronics gas purifiers dramatically reduce contaminant levels and absorb a greater variety of contaminants than other gas purification products. Advanced materials and design features guarantee that the modules will produce gases that are at least a factor of ten higher than a 99.9999% “chromatography grade” cylinder of gas when the purifier is supplied by a 99.995% cylinder. The cost difference between the two grades of gas will pay for the cost of the gas purifier several times over during its operating life."
 
This filter is for polishing a few thousanths of a percent in a 99.995 purity gas. It would be quickly overwhelmed working on 99.8 %
And of course handling such a device is tricky as just connecting to fittings or lines that had some air in them ruins it.
 
Bilsch said:
This filter is for polishing a few thousanths of a percent in a 99.995 purity gas. It would be quickly overwhelmed working on 99.8 %
And of course handling such a device is tricky as just connecting to fittings or lines that had some air in them ruins it.
Click to expand...

What about using Cal Gas? I posted this on the last page.
 
I can't help but think that either they can't produce a higher purity for whatever reason or the process of doing so is too consuming to be profitable. Otherwise I'd imagine they'd already be selling the stuff.
 
stpug said:
With excess sulfites already present and/or inappropriate yeast strain, it certain could hurt.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I suppose ale yeast could give you problems. I only brew lagers with WY2124 and have been doing the lodo thing for around a year now so my system is pretty dialed in for me. Even with 100 mg/l smb in the mash and 6-10 mg/l in the keg I've had no sulfur problems or off flavors. Now im cutting back on the smb and playing with Brewtan. I guess everyone needs to play around with things to find what works best for their systems.
 
I would argue that bottle conditioning is your best bet since oxygen is scavenged by default. At a recent Doemens seminar in Munich this was acknowledged too.

Packaging quickly becomes a terrible hurdle for home brewers. I'm afraid there is a trade off that just needs to be made if one wants to distribute blank beer.

Otherwise, a bit of speise and bottle is the safest and least complicated method (so it seems).

Force carbonating certainly increases the risk since the amount of co2 is so much larger than just using it to push it out. Diffusion rates from head space also seems much lower (empirically), so one might get away writhin a certain time span without noticeable detrimental effects.

Your mileage may vary but it's probably best to keep the theory in mind and find a practical compromise that works for you.

For what it's worth, I had great results with classic cold fermentation, bunging in secondary with 0.5-1.0 extract left, setting the PRV to 0.5 BAR.

It often took as long as 8 weeks for the beer
to stabilise of sorts. Then, I didn't notice any detrmental effects using generally available Co2 to push it out (these kegs don't last more than 2-3 weeks).

Instead of chasing a Potential red herring, it's probably best to be patient and not panic. I always found that suddenly a batch I thought would turn for the worse suddenly changed its mind and turned into a delightful drink.
 
Edelst0ff said:
Instead of chasing a Potential red herring, it's probably best to be patient and not panic. I always found that suddenly a batch I thought would turn for the worse suddenly changed its mind and turned into a delightful drink.
Click to expand...

Indeed.
 
Pulling it from the next batch. I've been doing Lagers more regularly to dial in the process, so I use a bit from the next to carb the previous.
 
I wanted to update with some more of my tasting notes now that I've had time to enjoy all the beers I tried this process on. While none of these have anything to compare against I have faith in my palate.
Neither IPA I made has seemed to have any difference in malt character. Good beers but I'm not noticing anything they didn't already have. However, the more malt focused beers I made have a noticeably cleaner malt character than usual. These being a smoked porter and weizenbock. The weizenbock blew my buddy(brewer/certified cicerone/BJCP judge who used to live in Germany) away and his favorite beer is Vitus.
Considering my only investment into all of this has been a brick of yeast for $5 and campden tabs I already had I plan to keep experimenting with it. The rest has been very basic process adjustments like moving to a full volume mash and loading my malt pipe before racking mash water in. Nothing hard.
I'm not sold that this does anything for hoppy beers, or at least IPAs, so I don't know if I'll use the process on those. But, I do see potential for the more malt focused styles. I still plan to do a side by side but thought I should give a final review of sorts for my first handful of batches.
 
My latest results (after lowering the SMB significantly) are:

An iteration of "Pun-ishment" Pale Ale that does not have much difference than my regular method.

An iteration of Forgot to Take Her Pilsner (actually technically a Kolsch) that is 75% 2-row and 25% white wheat that is significantly different (I still had some of another batch on tap.) The LoDO version of this recipe tastes like a very waterdown wheat beer, where previously very little to no wheat tastes was present. Taste testing non on my friends thought it was the same recipe. While I don't like the way this particular beer came out I do like the results, I'll have to decrease the wheat percentage next brew.
 
KeyWestBrewing said:
If you don't mind my asking what's the length of the piece you cut off?
Click to expand...

Sorry, already chunked it in the trash and don't really want to burrow through bags of dog poop to find it :)

I know it's not what you asked, but if I had to guess, the dip tube after trimming was no more than 3/8".

I just bought 6 new kegs and still need to cut the post on four of them. I'll measure one of those.
 
2nd LoDO brew behind me now. Efficiency 25% lower than normal... think my barley crusher is going to the scrap heap soon. Anyways...

I made a marzen this time around. Just like last time, there was 0 mash aroma. However the wort sample this time lacked the intense sweet grain flavor like the standard helles recipe had. Is that sweet grain flavor specific to pilsner malt?
 
I brewed Sunday and had a thought about the plate chiller I use. My usual set up is to mount the exchanger in the horizontal with the connections pointing up. This makes connecting things easy. However, on Sunday a light bulb went off.

First of all, in the past I had assumed that simply pumping through my plate chiller was sufficient enough to purge the air out of it. I would do this while the water was being deoxygenated.

On Sunday I thought I'm not super familiar with the inner workings of one of these things, but if it's like the brazed aluminum exchangers I've seen at work, there are a ton of minute passages. My next thought was that if this is true, there is most likely some air trapped in there, somehow, some way. What I did next was eye opening.

While prepping to deoxygenate the water I unfastened the exchanger, and with the pump running, tilted it to one side, then the other, and front to back as well. Every direction I tilted it, I could see and hear the air bubbles being dislodged and pushed out by the flow of the water. So much for taking extreme care took avoid oxygen uptake.

So now I'm questioning the suitability of plate chillers for low dissolved oxygen brewing. For those of you who might be more familiar with their inner workings, do I simply need to orient the exchanger differently to avoid these air pockets?
 
schematix said:
...Is that sweet grain flavor specific to pilsner malt?
Click to expand...

Kinda...Yes.
You can get a similar characteristic in other malts like 2-Row pale, but each malt will have its own unique lodo character.
Vienna is like fresh dough.
Munich is like bread crust or graham cracker.
Roast malts are far more intense, than before.
Something I used on Sunday gave me marshmallow/vanilla, but I haven't figured out which malt did that...Maybe it was caraMunich or a combination...Not sure, yet.


TexasWine said:
...I'm questioning the suitability of plate chillers for low dissolved oxygen brewing...
Click to expand...

You're on the right track...Anything that lets air hide is suspect.
I use a plate chiller, but I also also purge it & recirc for about 15 minutes, while my strike water is boiling. Then, I chill & dose my water with sodium metabisulfite. I think 50mg/l has been OK, but I'm right on the edge.
My biggest problem these days is being able to keep the flavors that I start with. The freshness can disappear, quite fast.

I know that I need to use more SMB than some of the others, until I can find the $ for a stainless convoluted chiller.
 
I brewed a 40L (10gal) hoppy APA and split in 2 kegs 4 weeks ago (following all the recommendations for flushing o2 and closed transfer, etc). One of the kegs I let carb with high purity instrument grade CO2 (<2ppm o2), and to the other I added 120g of dextrose dissolved in a small amount of boiled water (to sterilise and de-gass), along with a sprinkle of S04 dry yeast. I pressurized this keg to 1 bar (to ensure a proper seal) and have been observing the pressure build-up: it stayed at 1 bar (14psi) for around 2 weeks and then started slowly climbing to the target 2 bar (29psi) over the second 2 weeks. It does like like the dextrose method needs a good 4 weeks to fully ferment out.

Last night I hooked up the keg conditioned keg to compare to the co2 carbed keg which has been on tap for 3 weeks now. I am very sensitive to oxidised hop aromas as this is what I have been struggling with, and in comparing the 2 kegs I would say the co2 carbed keg smells 25% oxidised whereas the keg conditioned keg smells 0% oxidised (I find early oxidation more obvious on the aroma than on the flavor).

The first half pint was a little cloudy but after that the clarity was not far off the co2 carbed keg that has been sitting cold for 4 weeks.

Needless to say dextrose keg conditioning (for ales) will be my new standard procedure...

What I would like to know though is more about the o2-scrubbing action of the yeast, hopefully there is existing research available that I have not been able to find.

- Does the o2 scrubbing occur and complete within a matter of hours?
- How much (how little) dextrose will result in full o2 removal?
- How to maximise o2 scrubbing? Growth factor of yeast? etc.

Reason for asking is that ideally I add only a minor amount of dextrose just to get the yeast going and scrub out the o2 then then carb up the rest of the batch with co2 as theoretically this grade of co2 will only add 2.8ppb of DO in the beer, I consider this negligible. This means I can eliminate the 4 week wait.

I plan to experiment further but some of the above info would be very useful to have.
 
jdebonth said:
I brewed a 40L (10gal) hoppy APA and split in 2 kegs 4 weeks ago (following all the recommendations for flushing o2 and closed transfer, etc). One of the kegs I let carb with high purity instrument grade CO2 (<2ppm o2), and to the other I added 120g of dextrose dissolved in a small amount of boiled water (to sterilise and de-gass), along with a sprinkle of S04 dry yeast. I pressurized this keg to 1 bar (to ensure a proper seal) and have been observing the pressure build-up: it stayed at 1 bar (14psi) for around 2 weeks and then started slowly climbing to the target 2 bar (29psi) over the second 2 weeks. It does like like the dextrose method needs a good 4 weeks to fully ferment out.

Last night I hooked up the keg conditioned keg to compare to the co2 carbed keg which has been on tap for 3 weeks now. I am very sensitive to oxidised hop aromas as this is what I have been struggling with, and in comparing the 2 kegs I would say the co2 carbed keg smells 25% oxidised whereas the keg conditioned keg smells 0% oxidised (I find early oxidation more obvious on the aroma than on the flavor).

The first half pint was a little cloudy but after that the clarity was not far off the co2 carbed keg that has been sitting cold for 4 weeks.

Needless to say dextrose keg conditioning (for ales) will be my new standard procedure...

What I would like to know though is more about the o2-scrubbing action of the yeast, hopefully there is existing research available that I have not been able to find.

- Does the o2 scrubbing occur and complete within a matter of hours?
- How much (how little) dextrose will result in full o2 removal?
- How to maximise o2 scrubbing? Growth factor of yeast? etc.

Reason for asking is that ideally I add only a minor amount of dextrose just to get the yeast going and scrub out the o2 then then carb up the rest of the batch with co2 as theoretically this grade of co2 will only add 2.8ppb of DO in the beer, I consider this negligible. This means I can eliminate the 4 week wait.

I plan to experiment further but some of the above info would be very useful to have.
Click to expand...

there are posts talking about the rate of DO absorption by yeast in pure water. with beer, I would imagine it is different but on the same lines.
 
If you look at the tests done deoxygenating mash water with yeast/dextrose they show the yeast working pretty fast. Not sure what the minimum amount of sugar is for getting O2 to desired levels but 13g DME(or 7g dextrose IIRC) works for 8gal of water. Much less than you'd need to prime a keg. That's were I would start.

Why grade co2 do you have and where did you get it? From what I've been able to gather industrial grade is the purist stuff and some the others have other handling methods that could introduce impurities nobody would want in beer. Some even being carcinogens.
 
I think there's more at play than just co2 purity.

Every time you attach your grey gas QD to the keg post, a pocket of air gets trapped by the o ring and forced into the keg.

The flexible plastic gas lines are also oxygen permeable. It doesn't happen fast, but they have a lot of surface area and 4+ weeks is ample opportunity for a couple milligrams worth of atmospheric oxygen to diffuse, which is all it takes to damage the beer.

I have 4 AEB kegs that I bought brand new, but I will probably be going back to bottling soon.
 
I want to pick up their smaller 3 or 2.5 gallon models. I've been doing 3.5 gallon batches so I can do it all indoors and ferment in a corny. smaller serving kegs would be dope
 
KeyWestBrewing said:
Why grade co2 do you have and where did you get it? From what I've been able to gather industrial grade is the purist stuff and some the others have other handling methods that could introduce impurities nobody would want in beer. Some even being carcinogens.
Click to expand...

Here in Belgium the purer, low o2 grades of CO2 (4.5, 4.8) are easy to find and costs the same as the lower grades (3.0, 3.5, 4.0). I would be surprised if this is any different in the US as these are presumably international standards.

Could you look up where you have heard about the undocumented carcinogenic impurities? Scary stuff but this would surprise me...

Edit: Looks like it is available in the US also: http://www.praxair.com/-/media/docu...de/carbon-dioxide-co2-spec-sheet-ss-p4574.pdf

I bought grade 4.8 - Research. Cost me 30eur to fill up a big 10Kg cylinder.
 
techbrau said:
Every time you attach your grey gas QD to the keg post, a pocket of air gets trapped by the o ring and forced into the keg.
Click to expand...

Absolutely... I always push the valve inside the QD to flush out the gas lines and fill the little air pocket inside the QD with co2, but undoubtedly a small volume of air enters the keg with every connection. You could however unscrew the top QD valve mechanism, attach QD to keg, run co2 at a very low pressure, then then assemble the valve mechanism to the QD while co2 is flowing. Should be practically o2-free.

techbrau said:
The flexible plastic gas lines are also oxygen permeable. It doesn't happen fast, but they have a lot of surface area and 4+ weeks is ample opportunity for a couple milligrams worth of atmospheric oxygen to diffuse, which is all it takes to damage the beer.
Click to expand...

I wonder about this. Would this still happen given the pressure differential? Seems like any permeation would go in the reverse direction, but I do not understand the science well enough...
 
jdebonth said:
Here in Belgium the purer, low o2 grades of CO2 (4.5, 4.8) are easy to find and costs the same as the lower grades (3.0, 3.5, 4.0). I would be surprised if this is any different in the US as these are presumably international standards.

Could you look up where you have heard about the undocumented carcinogenic impurities? Scary stuff but this would surprise me...

Edit: Looks like it is available in the US also: http://www.praxair.com/-/media/docu...de/carbon-dioxide-co2-spec-sheet-ss-p4574.pdf

I bought grade 4.8 - Research. Cost me 30eur to fill up a big 10Kg cylinder.
Click to expand...


Google co2 impurities and lots of stuff like this comes up...

http://products.baseline-mocon.com/Asset/D032-1-BevAlert-Analytical-System.pdf

http://m.co2meter.com/?url=http://w...you-are-using-is-important&utm_referrer=#2730

The second link has a list of co2 grades with their purities.
 
Kit_B said:
You're on the right track...Anything that lets air hide is suspect.
I use a plate chiller, but I also also purge it & recirc for about 15 minutes, while my strike water is boiling. Then, I chill & dose my water with sodium metabisulfite. I think 50mg/l has been OK, but I'm right on the edge.
My biggest problem these days is being able to keep the flavors that I start with. The freshness can disappear, quite fast.

I know that I need to use more SMB than some of the others, until I can find the $ for a stainless convoluted chiller.
Click to expand...

Came into work this morning and did a little research. Looks like the plate chiller I use has a chevron type pattern. If I orient it in the vertical all the air pockets should be able to be flushed out. Now I just need to figure out a way to mount it.

PlateChiller.JPG
 
techbrau said:
I have 4 AEB kegs that I bought brand new, but I will probably be going back to bottling soon.
Click to expand...

Lately I've had this thought more often than I'd like to admit. My reluctance to go back to bottling doesn't seem to be rooted in the desire to avoid the work. Rather, it's pride associated with rolling up the garage door and inviting neighbors to pull a swig from my keezer.

At this point my crave for the admiration of other people trumps my quest for the ultimate beer.
 
Was the natural carbed keg stored warm or cold for those 4 weeks?

Often when i do 10 gallon batches I natural carb one keg and force carb the other. They seem pretty well carbonated within about a week, and settled and clear after two weeks total. I wouldn't expect it to take 4 weeks to be fully carbed and settled.

How did you determine when to rack them to the kegs? catching those last few gravity pints has been basically a disaster for me...
 
enkamania said:
Currently I use Bru'n water for my water adjustments. I'm wondering, what effect does pre-boiling have on mineral content?
Click to expand...

The only effect that pre-boiling might have on water is that water with high Temporary Hardness might have a reduction in alkalinity and calcium content. This might be observed as the water getting cloudy when boiled and a white sediment (chalk) in the pot when allowed to settle. All other ion concentrations will remain unchanged.
 
techbrau said:
The flexible plastic gas lines are also oxygen permeable. It doesn't happen fast, but they have a lot of surface area and 4+ weeks is ample opportunity for a couple milligrams worth of atmospheric oxygen to diffuse, which is all it takes to damage the beer.
Click to expand...


I wouldn't be ready to go down that rabbit hole so easily without some testing. I know plastic is permeable but the question really is how much, if any, ingress do the lines actually allow? And, as mentioned, would it even matter given the lines are under constant pressure. According to Wambles over at CCB the best crown caps allow ~60ppb ingress per month so bottles might not be any better when it comes down to it. Without numbers though there's really no way to make a legit comparison. Not sure how you'd test that out though.


Magnus314 said:
How did you determine when to rack them to the kegs? catching those last few gravity pints has been basically a disaster for me...
Click to expand...


I think some of those guys are fermenting in kegs which makes taking gravity samples easy. They're also slowly bringing fermentation to a crawl as they lager per Narziss info IIRC. I can't speak from experience but I get the impression this makes it easier to hit the mark.
 
jdebonth said:
You could however unscrew the top QD valve mechanism, attach QD to keg, run co2 at a very low pressure, then then assemble the valve mechanism to the QD while co2 is flowing. Should be practically o2-free.
Click to expand...

I think you might get sprayed a bit while screwing in the cap til the seal ring seats.
 

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