Pressure canning wort

[Shockerengr]

Is it normal to have a 1/4 to 1/2 inch of hot break in the jar?

I canned 7 quarts and 7 pints of 1.046 wort today, and have good amount of hot break. I imagine this is normal.

When you use this, do you pour the whole jar into your flask, or decant off of the trub?

yeah, and in my experience the higher temps in the PC seem to create even more break.

 

[nutty_gnome]

So I've got a question. I've been pressure canning 1.040 wort and priming sugar solutions for a year now and its great. I love the convienence.

One issue I have is that a quart of 1.040 wort is sometimes not enough to get a good starter going. So I have to use 2 quarts of starter. This takes up valuable space and time to create twice as many quart jars.

My question is this: Why don't we pressure can 1.080 wort and then add a quart of water to it the day of the starter? For me, this means either boiling and cooling just water (no big deal) in a flask or using a quart of premade sterile pressure canned water. Taken together the SG would be around the magical 1.040 number and we'd have twice the wort for the time and space needed to create just one jar of wort.

Anyone see a drawback to this idea?

 

[Shockerengr]

well for the second option, "using a quart of premade sterile water" I don't see what you'd gain..since you'd still have the same number of jars. Unless you wanted to have some with boiled and some with sterile water.

Boiling would work ok as long as you aren't working with slants or very low cell counts. But for me, it takes away part of the advantage of using premade wort (not having to cool things off)

 

[nutty_gnome]

well for the second option, "using a quart of premade sterile water" I don't see what you'd gain..since you'd still have the same number of jars. Unless you wanted to have some with boiled and some with sterile water.

Boiling would work ok as long as you aren't working with slants or very low cell counts. But for me, it takes away part of the advantage of using premade wort (not having to cool things off)

I keep sterile water in quart jars anyway to use for topping off purposes. But we can agree that just canning water is simpler than canning wort, perhaps.

 

[Shockerengr]

Ah, well if you've already got the water, then yeah, that would work... But you'd still be using two jars each time (1.080 isn't great for starters by itself)

 

[Trub_Catt]

Finally signed up so please bear with me. I read somewhere you can boil the jars, and lids in the wort itself. Pull the nearly full jar out of boil with boiled tongs, then grab the lid out with tongs set on jar. Get some gloves and tighten lid. Continue boil for ten minutes. Any comments?

 

[waterskj]

<edit> can I delete a post that was sent before I was finished? Sorry for the double post

 

[waterskj]

Finally signed up so please bear with me. I read somewhere you can boil the jars, and lids in the wort itself. Pull the nearly full jar out of boil with boiled tongs, then grab the lid out with tongs set on jar. Get some gloves and tighten lid. Continue boil for ten minutes. Any comments?

This is called Hot Water Bath canning and is not sufficient for wort. This can lead to botulism. There were links in this thread already to canning safty sites.

but JIC

http://nchfp.uga.edu/
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/securit/kitchen-cuisine/food-canning-conserve-aliment-eng.php

You must pressure can wort for safe shelf storage. (ie not frozen or refridgerated)

 

[Trub_Catt]

Thanks for the reply waterskj. So a week or two in the fridge should still be safe using that method?

 

[mpcluever]

Lot of talk about boiling jars first, boiling wort first, lot of extra work. It all gets up to 250 in the canner. I mix up the wort with DME cold. Seems like it doesn't clump as bad doing it cold. Then just put the cold wort in jars. Once everything's in the canner, you have to let it start steaming out the vent until all the air is purged out and it's all steam coming out. Then you cap it and let it start building pressure. Once you get to 15 PSI, that's when you start the timer. I usually do 15 minutes. I've kept jars at room temp for YEARS and it's just as good as the day I made it. It takes about a minute and a half to do a starter. Just sanitize a flask, pop and dump in a jar or two, add the yeast and it's off and running!

 

[Shockerengr]

Lot of talk about boiling jars first, boiling wort first, lot of extra work. It all gets up to 250 in the canner. I mix up the wort with DME cold. Seems like it doesn't clump as bad doing it cold. Then just put the cold wort in jars. Once everything's in the canner, you have to let it start steaming out the vent until all the air is purged out and it's all steam coming out. Then you cap it and let it start building pressure. Once you get to 15 PSI, that's when you start the timer. I usually do 15 minutes. I've kept jars at room temp for YEARS and it's just as good as the day I made it. It takes about a minute and a half to do a starter. Just sanitize a flask, pop and dump in a jar or two, add the yeast and it's off and running!

I'll second this in that it works just fine, I have however gone back to preboiling the wort - but only to reduce the amount of trub I get in the jars and maximize the amount of wort I have available. It doesn't eliminate it, but I do seem to end up with half as much trub canned. I don't like adding trub when stepping up of slants because it's harder to see the yeast when the levels are so small

Downside is it's more work up front. So you may find it preferable or effective to use the time to can more wort than making cleaner wort. The yeast will be happy either way.

 

[mpcluever]

It IS a good point that there is some trub in the jar when I'm done. When I did an all-grain canning session, the break was absolutely INSANE in there. Big protein webs of crap clinging to everything. Using DME is pretty typical to have a small amount in the bottom. It's pretty easy to decant the clear wort off until the trub gets to the neck of the jar.
My roommate and I were discussing this as I wrote my response last night and we remembered that there's a filter that fits in the funnel that I'll probably use going forward. I just got my microscope so who knows, I may be trying to minimize that break material as much as possible.

 

[Shockerengr]

It's not hard to decant, especially if you're careful to not disturb, but I was using multiple jars to build starters up for 15 gallon batches, and was trying to maximize the amount i could get from each one.

For the first step off a slant it didn't matter since I was throwing half a pint away anyways.