Stratification?

[mosaicbrewer]

Hello all, trying to figure something out. My home brewing crew that brews together pretty often is having a weird problem. We are doing all grain, full boil beers, starting with about 21 gallons. We do an intense 60 minute boil and end up with about 18 gallons of wort in our 27 gallon blichman conical. We are temp controlled and very thorough with what we do. The beers we make are almost always super hoppy, with as much as 3-4 pounds of hops in the batch by the time all of it is dry hopped. After dry hopping we do a 36 hour cold crash. Our problem arises from here. We get together to keg. With our spigot at 12:00 we drain the fermenter into 3 kegs in succession. We have been getting very smooth hop and yeast clear trasnsfers. We then take them to our respective houses for carbonation. Somehow almost every time we are noticing differences in our three kegs. One house the beer almost always seems a little sweeter there, the others are a crapshoot. This batch we are almost noticing color differences in them. We are super careful with oxidation as well so I assume that has nothing to do with the color. I am feeling like we need to stir the beer before we keg. I should mention that we are all pretty well on the same page with draft line cleanliness, carbonation pressures and temps. Does this make any sense to anyone? It is driving us batty. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ajdelange]

Does the guy whose beer always seems sweeter always get the keg from the bottom of the CC, or the top, or the middle? Is the beer carbonated with gas or by priming? How are the chill bands arranged on the CC? What does "...almost noticing color differences in them..." mean?

 

[cmoewes]

Wow. That sounds like a weird thing.

I wonder if you could blow some CO2 into the drain pipe to mix the beer without creating any oxidation?

 

[mosaicbrewer]

Does the guy whose beer always seems sweeter always get the keg from the bottom of the CC, or the top, or the middle? Is the beer carbonated with gas or by priming? How are the chill bands arranged on the CC? What does "...almost noticing color differences in them..." mean?

the sweeter beer seems to come from the bottom of the conical. The conical itself is in a commercial beverage fridge with temp regulator, so no bands. The last keg this time is a bit more murky than the others may just be yeast precipitate causing it to look a bit darker. I thought about injecting the conical with co2 but the whole thing is I want everything settled.

 

[doug293cz]

The only stuff that might stratify is the particulates (yeast, protein, etc.) suspended in the beer. As these settle out during the cold crash, there will be more particulates near the bottom of the fermenter than the top. Thus the first keg filled will have more of the particulates that haven't completely settled to the bottom of the fermenter.

To mitigate this, you could do a longer cold crash, and or use fining agents (like gelatin or Polyclar) to get more of the particulates fully settled before you keg.

Brew on