Preventing oxidation during bottling

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rkausch

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I’ve been brewing a while, and most of the time, I keg my beers. When I want to bottle them, I use a counter pressure bottling gun, which works awesome. My challenge is for refermenting / bottle conditioned beers.

I love making Belgians, and I recently picked up a floor corker so I can cork and cage them, and age the bottles for a while. I did a 10 gallon tripel last year, put it into several competitions, and received the feedback that it was heavily oxidized. After analyzing my process, I narrowed the source to my bottling process. I’m hoping someone here has some suggestions for how to reduce the exposure.

I have two 60L speidel fermenters, one for primary and one for secondary / bottling. As I had racked the tripel and left it in secondary for a while, I had anticipated that there wasn’t enough yeast for carbonating, so I did a starter, decanted it, and added it to secondary along with the priming sugar (dissolved dme). My oxygen source came from the next step. I noticed that everything kept settling out of solution, so I had to keep stirring it to get consistency in priming sugar / yeast. As this was a 10 gallon batch in a single vessel (with only me filling and corking), it happened quite a bit.

I have a quad that’s ready to bottle, and my sample I tasted is amazing, and I don’t want to introduce the same problems.

How can I fix it? One thought was to use an inverted stainless steel racking cane connected to my co2 bottle as a kind of makeshift whirlpool mechanism, but that might use a lot of co2.

Thanks!
Rob
 
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