Raw Ale / No Boil

[applescrap]

I don't know why my phone isn't uploading pictures. Note this is much more stringent pasteurization than lacto iirc. Sorry still no attachment. I'll try to attach the link.

https://goo.gl/images/vfzR9t

 

[Miraculix]

So here is a pasteurization chart showing how long something needs to sit at each temperature. You can see if the beer enters the fermenter at 145, then that's probably going to be good enough and any higher all the better. For me I will work quicker next time and just make sure that beer enters the sanitized fermenter after the mash much quicker. Even if the colander and squeeze bucket aren't sanitized, at 145 degrees the beer will pasteurize in 10 minutes.

I agree. I am only a bit worried about the parts that do not get permanent contact with the wort (you do not fill it to the top and the lid does not touch it as well). So the usual sanitation routine plus the wort above 140 degrees ( 60 c) should do the job.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

I'd be very, very cautious of reading across from eg poultry charts like that one. Chicken people are just worried about bacteria, specifically the "Big 3" - E.coli, Salmonella & Campylobacter. And since they're only worried about getting it onto your plate within minutes, and through your gut within a day or two, they typically quote the time taken for a reduction of 90% of bacteria - say 2 minutes at 70C.

However, you need a much higher level of sanitation than mere chicken if you're going to be leaving things with 5 gallons of nutrients for a couple of weeks. When I worked in labs, fungi were always far more of a problem than bacteria, even on media that were intended for growing bacteria. You'd even get the odd fungal spore germinating after 20 minutes in a medical autoclave - but it was only in a small proportion of cases, months after autoclaving. Using a domestic pressure cooker was noticably less effective, but could still keep them at bay for weeks (we tended to only use the pressure cooker for I-need-this-to-happen-tonight stuff though).

So don't regard 60-70C as the last word in sterilisation - it's not, it's a continuum and even after 20 minutes at >120C, there will still be the odd fungal spore surviving. But that's unlikely to be a problem in the typical fermenation of a week or two. But the kind of thing that's tolerated in chicken, is probably going to be a problem for wort.

 

[applescrap]

I'd be very, very cautious of reading across from eg poultry charts like that one. Chicken people are just worried about bacteria, specifically the "Big 3" - E.coli, Salmonella & Campylobacter. And since they're only worried about getting it onto your plate within minutes, and through your gut within a day or two, they typically quote the time taken for a reduction of 90% of bacteria - say 2 minutes at 70C.

However, you need a much higher level of sanitation than mere chicken if you're going to be leaving things with 5 gallons of nutrients for a couple of weeks. When I worked in labs, fungi were always far more of a problem than bacteria, even on media that were intended for growing bacteria. You'd even get the odd fungal spore germinating after 20 minutes in a medical autoclave - but it was only in a small proportion of cases, months after autoclaving. Using a domestic pressure cooker was noticably less effective, but could still keep them at bay for weeks (we tended to only use the pressure cooker for I-need-this-to-happen-tonight stuff though).

So don't regard 60-70C as the last word in sterilisation - it's not, it's a continuum and even after 20 minutes at >120C, there will still be the odd fungal spore surviving. But that's unlikely to be a problem in the typical fermenation of a week or two. But the kind of thing that's tolerated in chicken, is probably going to be a problem for wort.

This is not my understanding. Iirc the opposite is actually true. Especially considering the presence of ethanol. Lacto has a lower pasteurization temp than the turkey/poultry. In fact that mere chicken plays a role in, according to some sources, 9000 deaths a year from food disease. When beer goes sour we love it. Bob Brews did no chill for like 2 years and drank it on a basic Brewing podcast. It actually might have been older or younger I can't remember but it's well-documented. The usda regulations for poultry are among the most stringent. We all know this is generally speaking and there are outliers but there were lower number charts and i offered a pretty strict one. If I'm completely wrong on all this please fill me in.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

In most cases we don't love it when beer goes sour - Acetobacter or Lactobacillus are major faults in most beer, such as the lagers mentioned above. But they're fine in chicken. I was thinking more of wild yeasts and other fungi, which don't really get a foothold in chicken because there's no time, but which are happy growing and contaminating some wort held at fermentation temperatures for a few weeks.

No chill is not really relevant here - if you do it right then it's no different to normal cooling from a contamination point of view.

Don't kid yourself about the USDA, they've been so captured by producer interests that the US' lax food safety standards are one of the biggest sticking points in doing a trade deal with the EU.

You gave us an unsourced chart which talks of (undefined) "pasteurisation" at eg 0.2 minutes at 160F. I was quoting my personal experience of the odd fungus surviving 20 minutes >250F. We are literally talking orders of magnitude difference in sterilisation. Your chart is pretty meaningless unless it said what it was actually referring to - kill rate and organism; as I say, my guess would be that it's a 90% kill of one of the main food bacteria.

And that's fine, different scenarios need different amount of sterilisation, you wouldn't want all chicken autoclaved because the meat would be inedible, and 90% kill of Salmonella etc is good enough for most purposes.

 

[applescrap]

Don't kid yourself about the USDA, they've been so captured by producer interests that the US' lax food safety standards....

I don't understand why you would take a dig at US food and safety. The Volkswagen diesel emission scandal, a massive horse meat scandal, anecdotal comments about food quality and taste in England, and your laxidasical comments about chicken. Clearly the US isn't the only one with a problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...food-poisoning-health-safety-deaths-thinktank

 

[RustyHorn]

I don't understand why you would take a dig at US food and safety. The Volkswagen diesel emission scandal, a massive horse meat scandal, anecdotal comments about food quality and taste in England, and your laxidasical comments about chicken. Clearly the US isn't the only one with a problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...food-poisoning-health-safety-deaths-thinktank

They were scandals, not things authorised by the food standard agencies. Also, food taste in England is a myth. It comes from Asian communities complaining about how English food is bland. English food is actually very varied and the more traditional foods are very similar to French food - which is regarded as the best in the world. There are more Michelin starred restaurants in England than any other country outside France. We do have bad teeth though.

 

[applescrap]

The raw pumpkin is in the fridge and looks and smells nice. Dumped in gelatin today, cant wait to rack it and drink it, happy thanksgiving!

 

[applescrap]

Had to pull the pumpkin early. Was planning to let it clear for a few days before racking, but realized i needed to today. Racked it up. The fining or something messed with the spices or maybe not enough spices. Clearly no ill-effects from the no boil part of it. Need to figure out how the Hops work but made an awesome beer for sure. I will probably stop boiling most beers until further notice. Everyone knows I love to drink beer but I don't like to brew. The freshness of the unboiled Wort I enjoy.

 

[cmac62]

Okay, I cracked another pair of my 70 shilling exbeeriment beers the other night, and the truth is I like the boiled beer significantly better than its no boil brother. The 45 or so boil helped to bring everything together and it is a much more, mature, robust beer.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Gah, my original reply was lost in the boards upgrade.

I don't understand why you would take a dig at US food and safety. The Volkswagen diesel emission scandal, a massive horse meat scandal, anecdotal comments about food quality and taste in England, and your laxidasical comments about chicken. Clearly the US isn't the only one with a problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...food-poisoning-health-safety-deaths-thinktank

Fortunately I don't eat Volkswagens, and if you're going to include the rest of Europe it should be pointed out that you can find horsemeat in French supermarkets, they even have dedicated horse butchers, so the "scandal" of horsemeat is more a matter of cultural perspective. And I think I was trying to bring some precision to your lacksadaisical graph about chicken.

Just as background, I was tangentially involved in some of this kind of stuff in a previous life - I was just a minion but my boss was the guy that the USDA would call when they wanted to talk to "Britain" about our speciality. So I have seen this stuff from the inside, and personally I get suspicious when there aren't scandals - for instance it was always strange that France didn't report any cases of BSE when all her neighbours had it. In our little world it was another of our friends across the Channel that always seemed to be the source of problems, either through carelessness or illegality. They were so in thrall to their industry that the only problems that hit the headlines were the ones that had spiralled out of control; "UK testing discovers problem in imports of X from country Y" didn't normally get into the papers.

You do realise how lame it sounds to include "anecdotal comments about food quality and taste in England" in a discussion of food safety? I could equally judge US food safety on anecdotal stories about the taste of Big Macs. There may be a load of tourist dives in London which no local ever goes to, but there's no excuse for eating badly in the UK these days. Same also applies to beer, London is kinda notorious for cellarmanship that's below the UK average, but presumably uninformed tourists help keep those places in business - and there's plenty of great beer if you take the trouble to inform yourself where it is.

As it happens I've also been involved on that side of the fence, so I'm well aware of what it takes to get a 5* food hygiene rating. Merely having a clean kitchen only gets you 1-2*, most of it is all about process - dating food, recording fridge temperatures, that kind of thing. It's onerous, but it does mean that the hygiene ratings mean something.

But I never said that the UK was perfect, merely that the US is lax in comparison. From your Guardian link : "Each year food poisoning results in 20,000 people being hospitalised and 500 deaths." The US has nearly 5x the population of the UK, so if the US had a similar food safety record to the UK, you'd expect the US to have just under 100,000 hospitalisations and 2500 deaths.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/5/5/99-0502_article
"foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year"

QED

 

[rubyroo]

Hey guys, I just finished my second no boil beer. The first went fairly well. I did a simple 50/50 malted wheat and pils with 2 ounces of Czech Saaz and 1 ounce of Perle for a 30 min hop stand at 170. Fermented with US 05. I kept things pretty simple to get a nice baseline. I obtained a nice rounded bitterness despite never going over 170. Which makes me think the current theory of zero IBU / utilization under 180 is incorrect.. or maybe it's beta acids or other bittering compounds. But I digress.

My second batch entered the fermentor last night. 2/3 2row and 1/3 malted wheat. Hop stand at 170 for 30 min with 1 oz Nelson Sauvin (All I had on hand) and I pitched my recently isolated strains of wild Sacc and Brett that I recently isolated and cultured up from a Saskatoon berry. I wanted to go full farmhouse on this batch.

Does anyone know if I should be concerned about contact time with the settled proteins and hops? while I let the Brett do its work post primary fermentation. I know Brett has a tendency to clean up after certain off flavours but I'm not sure about it being over exposed to hops or cold break.

 

[Miraculix]

Cannot tell you anything useful on this one but I really like your isolated wild yeast idea. I also have a raw wild Brett one going on atm... Well, it was an accident, but wild is wild

I did brew a raw pils (technically speaking, yours is an ale and not a pils), it tasted really good for the first month but now I have 20 gushing and bad tasting bottles left... They are infected I guess. My fault, will keep more focus on sanitization in the future.

Sanitation is really a hot topic in raw brewing. Had to learn this the hard way.

 

[madscientist451]

I did brew a raw pils (technically speaking, yours is an ale and not a pils), it tasted really good for the first month but now I have 20 gushing and bad tasting bottles left... They are infected I guess. My fault, will keep more focus on sanitization in the future.

Sanitation is really a hot topic in raw brewing. Had to learn this the hard way.

I'm thinking that brewing smaller batches that will be consumed quickly, and kegging instead of bottling (keep the beer cold) is the best way to go with no boil/raw brews. Boiling the beer really helps with "shelf stability".

 

[Miraculix]

100 % agree. If there should be a "sleeping infection" in the beer (like it must likely was the case in my pils) your suggested treatment of the brew would make sure that the infection does not have the time to "wake up" and ruin the beer.

But I also really think that this shouldn't be necessary if the wort is heated up to 70c, kept there for let's say 15 minutes, and then being introduced into the sanitized fermenter.

I did not work well with that Pilsener regarding applying of proper sanitation. It really was my own fault in this case.

 

[rubyroo]

Thanks, I've been itching to pitch these strains as I've been culturing them for a while. I'm definitely going to let the gravity stabilize before bottling so I don't get any gushers. I have had pretty good luck with the hop stand at 170 for half an hour. No 'infections' or accidental sours to speak of. Although I think I might try a sour with this method.

 

[Miraculix]

The hop stand at 170 sounds like a good and effective way to keep it clean. I
might try that in the future. How did you calculate the amount of hops you needed?

 

[Miraculix]

Btw. I just bottled today my dark raw mild. It is a real session mild, around 3.2% alc, lots of roasted and toasted grains and flaked barley. I am really really curious how this one turns out. The first falt sample when botteling tasted really promising. Lots of roast character, coffee chocolate, but not as intense as in stout or porter.

Will post the recipe when it turns out good. No crystal involved, I really do not like crystal malt any more. Instead, Amber, brown and chocolate malts to give it a nice character

 

[applescrap]

Drinking through the pumkin still and enjoying it. Hops need consideration as does the no chill effect on hops. The no boil portion of this beer gives it a freshness and richness. I don't think we know enough to be determining shelf stability of no boil beers at this point. Also this is a long-standing method of beer brewing that I would guess has certainly proven stability at least in the Saison Market.

 

[rubyroo]

170 for a half hour seems sufficient. I raise the temp in the kettle to perform a mash out and then the hop stand / pasteurization temp. My ovens lowest temp is 170 which is very convenient.

I've been doing a bunch of research and having trouble finding any good info on bitterness calculations when doing a hop stand only and never exceeding 170f. It's considered sub isomerization temp and therefore zero ibu.. as I said before I certainly had enough bitterness to balance the sweetness of my beer which finished at 1.011. It was certainly perceivable and firm but harmonious and far from sharp. I have really just been winging it at this point. There seems to be very little good data.

I am also very curious about the long term shelf stability. The generally accepted idea is that haze leads to instability. But many wit/wheat, saison or NEIPA are very hazy. I think sanitation and oxygen exposure are factors. It would be interesting to see just when these beers become undrinkable. Other factors I could think of are ABV and cold or warm storage. I feel like if they are higher in alcohol and stored cold they should last a lot longer.

I will be brewing a no boil stout soon. The texture of this style should lend itself perfectly to a nice thick stout. Let us know how your dark mild turns out.

 

[applescrap]

Once again in considering stability, its worth noting that this style is not new at all and has a rich history. I think this person has done a lot of writing on this style. I agree with his conclusions. I will be Brewing a stout as well soon. I think I'm going to shoot for an 1.5 hour brewday. Taking my normal 2.5 and making it 1.5. Or maybe ten gallons in 2?

http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/331.html

 

[Miraculix]

Tried my raw dark mild yesterday. After one day naturally carbonation on top of the radiator

It wasn't fully carbonated, but let's call it 2/3.

It was a tiny bit too bitter for my taste. Don't know if it is hop or dark malt related, but I guess the latter. Well, it is as green as it can be, I think 6 days after being malt, yeast and water.

Regarding the fact that this beer is a 3% session beer, it is amazing. It is full of flavour with a nice mouth feel. I do not know if the reason can be found in the fact that it is raw, or in the recipe with 20%flaked barley plus amber, brown and chocolate malt.

I will keep you updated when I am back from my three weeks of travelling, starting this Saturday.

 

[Miraculix]

Once again in considering stability, its worth noting that this style is not new at all and has a rich history. I think this person has done a lot of writing on this style. I agree with his conclusions. I will be Brewing a stout as well soon. I think I'm going to shoot for an 1.5 hour brewday. Taking my normal 2.5 and making it 1.5. Or maybe ten gallons in 2?

http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/331.html

Just read the link. Maybe my raw Pilsener does not suffer from an infection but from the breakdown of the proteins. Who knows... I think I brewed it around two months ago and it started to taste funny roughly 6 weeks after brewing it. I forgot to empty the leftover bottles yesterday, maybe I will keep a few, just to see how it develops further.

 

[Killshakes]

Some myths that people should know that I am extremely confident in now:


3. Using whirlfloc completely clears the beer, even at 165 degrees.

I think this might be the most interesting revelation in this thread--to me, anyway. It makes me wonder about the recommended boiling times for WF. Could it be that WF would be much more effective when powdered and added to wort (boiled or not) around 170 F, instead of boiled for however long? I'd be very curious to see how well this works in a standard, boiled beer.

 

[rubyroo]

I am going to look into that blog later. Im curious if whirlfloc and/or gelatin could get the beer clear and improve stability. If the beer did not have as much haze (read: proteins in suspension) it might have the same longevity as a regular boiled ale. Not sure about the whirlfloc efficacy.

 

[rubyroo]

Applescrap, I have read this article and it actually says quite directly that raw ale lack shelf stability.

"The protein never does get removed. That seems to be at least part of why many of these beers have poor stability."

It seems to be fairly well documented that raw ale and hazy beers lack the shelf stability of their boiled and or pasteurized counterparts. Im curious as to whether whirlfloc or other finings might be able to mitigate this.

 

[Miraculix]

My girlfriend likes her room very warm. Did store some beers in there for a couple of weeks, those turned bad, were not tasting nice any more.

I thought the batch was lost and wanted to throw away the rest I stored at home in a cooler room, those actually were tasting really nice now.... So temperature seems to play a big role... Just hints, no actual prove.

 

[applescrap]

@rubyroo That is good to know. Since I am trying to drink less I wont make 10g and only make 5 at a time. Stored cold I would hope the beer would last a month or two, no? I am never to worried about stability as I have never aged a beer.

 

[applescrap]

It seems like a good experiment for brulosophy to make two raw ales and age one. I have to admit this pumpkin is aging quickly. Seemingly getting darker, but also better?

 

[Beerswimmer]

I wonder if high acid will help with the shelf life? I brewed 3 kettle sours(L. plantarum) a while back, all no boils. One is bottled and will sit until Xmas before really drinking, tastes good so far a month + after brew day. 2 others are still on fruit. They also all have a few strains of brett in them. Planning on brewing another tomorrow the same way.