Wort Chillers

[Qs]

Well I ordered a Hydra from Jaded. Can't wait to try it out, it better be good.

[armedcor]

Did you use a shipping service? When I checked out the cost plus shipping I instantly lost the urge to buy haha

[Qs]

I just paid what the site asked for. It was expensive but I figured its cheaper than a plate chill and a pump.

[biertourist]

Briefly back to HSA: I DO think that Hot Side Aeration at a homebrew scale and with typical home brew setups will be more of a concern than in commercial breweries because of our much higher surface area to volume ratios and because most of our transfers involve additional introduction of oxygen -we don't have closed systems like most large commercial breweries. (And most / all? of the research around HSA has been focused on the big mega breweries.)

This is also why DMS formation really isn't an issue at a homebrew scale (much higher surface area to volume ratio means we evolve off much more DMS much faster than the big guys) -as long as you don't do something like "no chill" brewing with lager malt.


Adam

[biertourist]

Briefly back to HSA: I DO think that Hot Side Aeration at a homebrew scale and with typical home brew setups will be more of a concern than in commercial breweries because of our much higher surface area to volume ratios and because most of our transfers involve additional introduction of oxygen -we don't have closed systems like most large commercial breweries. (And most / all? of the research around HSA has been focused on the big mega breweries.) But, no I don't think it's a significant concern most of the time. (I've been reading more stuff from Denny Con, who actually tests his oxygen levels and has been doing some structured tasting of his beers before and after modifying processes to involve less hot side air introduction and HSA might not be fully in the "myth" category.  Unlikely in typical cases, yes; myth, no.)

This is also why DMS formation really isn't an issue at a homebrew scale (much higher surface area to volume ratio means we evolve off much more DMS much faster than the big guys) -as long as you don't do something like "no chill" brewing with lager malt.


Adam

[mr hoppy]

Not sure I understand the relevance of the question to the topic of wort chillers...

You're right, I could have made it clearer but I was looking at this:

I agree, but if you already have a pump, save a small bit of the copper and make a jamil-style recirculation arm.  (Or if you don't get a 5 euro plastic mash paddle and put it into a cordless power drill and whirlpool the whole volume of wort for the first 6 minutes you're chilling -you'll get down below DMS formation temps EASILY within 6 minutes with the wort whirlpooling.)

[Qs]

Briefly back to HSA: I DO think that Hot Side Aeration at a homebrew scale and with typical home brew setups will be more of a concern than in commercial breweries because of our much higher surface area to volume ratios and because most of our transfers involve additional introduction of oxygen -we don't have closed systems like most large commercial breweries. (And most / all? of the research around HSA has been focused on the big mega breweries.)

This is also why DMS formation really isn't an issue at a homebrew scale (much higher surface area to volume ratio means we evolve off much more DMS much faster than the big guys) -as long as you don't do something like "no chill" brewing with lager malt.


Adam

I'm not saying you are wrong but don't both of these points sort of contradict what most experts say these days? IE DMS is something to be worried about and HSA is not.

[mr hoppy]

Adam, every time you mention no chill I think of this thread 

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/dumping-batch-infected-139563/

and here's the punchline

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/dumping-batch-infected-139563/index5.html#post1588007

ugliest thing I've ever seen on a home-brew forum and then some

sorry that's about a million miles off topic - but it's a serious advert for getting some sort of a chiller!

[biertourist]

I'm not saying you are wrong but don't both of these points sort of contradict what most experts say these days? IE DMS is something to be worried about and HSA is not.

Certainly contradicts what most commenters on most home brew forums say these days.  Most of the true experts are focused on macro lager production and mega scale breweries and when we take those generalizations of VERY different home brew systems we often leap to the wrong conclusion.

You don't want DMS but its only a significant concern when a large % of your basemalt is pilsner or lager malt; DMS is rapidly formed and evolved off during a vigorous boil and the precursors only turn to DMS and remain in the beer a temperatures between 145F (estimate from memory but this is definitely within the "Safe zone" and probably bit low) and just below boiling.  The rate of evaporation and therefore DMS evolution is based upon how vigor the boil is and the surface area to volume ratio.

So as long as you have a vigorous 60 min boil in a home-brew sized batch and you rapidly chill your beer from boiling down to 145F or lower you should be good-to-go even with lager malt.  By all means play it safe with a 90 min boil if you want, but DMS is most apparent in light colored beers that will be needlessly darkened by the extended boil, you're also wasting energy and extending your brew day if you do it and you don't need to.



Adam

[biertourist]

The issue with Hot Side Aeration isn't that it's a "myth" in that it doesn't happen, no serious scientist thinks that it's a "myth" although I'll admit that I certainly heard people say this before and attribute it to Dr. Charles Bamforth (I've said myself that it's a "myth" before many times and thought that, myself), but I'm learning that the truth is a bit more complicated...

Hot Side Aeration was considered a huge boogie man and was getting WAY too much focus by some brewers as some sort of brewing boogie man that was responsible for all sorts of beer related problems. HSA is a real thing and it absolutely happens, Dr. Charles Bamforth was responding to that and his super in depth look at the subject (in big brewery conditions, mind you) and his summary in the 2009 Brewing Network interview was basically that he finds that we're way over focused on HSA and that he feels like HSA isn't anywhere as big of a deal as people were making it out to be and that there are actually just as many (he argues more) ways that hot side aeration can positively impact the final beer.  -Having said that Dr. Bamforth was in the minority of serious brewing scientists taking that stance that HSA has a net positive impact on beer.


I think the idea that we dont' want to be overly focused on one brewing boogieman (except for maybe general sanitization) because it will cause us to lose track of the bigger picture is a GREAT stance to take, BUT because people have taken the 2009 advice of Dr. Bamforth and are communicating it as "HSA is a myth; it doesn't exist", the pendelum has now swung too extreme to the other side. 

In the search of constantly improving and perfecting our beer there becomes a point in time in which HSA could be the main detriment to your beer quality, especially light colored beers.  MANY, MANY very experienced and scientifically minded homebrewers can tell you that they will absolutely see and taste a difference in beers that have been highly aerated while recirculation mashing -say with a rotating / spraying sparge arm, for example.  In Denny Conn and Drew Beechum's new book "Experimental Homebrewing", they talk about the impacts that they've seen in side-by-side batches of beer with one overly aerated on the hotside and one that wasn't.

Like everything in brewing the general advice is based upon typical situations, and especially from the real serious professionals like Dr. Bamforth, it's usually geared towards what happens in a large commercial brewery that is very different than ours.  We want to look to the theory that we get from folks like Dr. Bamforth and then see how it applies to our homebrew scales and then work backwards and figure out what's happening when it doesn't.  -Crazy things like recirculation mashing that sprays a fine mist of wort through the air for the entirety of a 60 minute mash is certainly WAY outside the realm of anything that would happen in a large macro brewery and therefore we're going to see a significantly different result.

As a general rule, HSA shouldn't be a significant boogie man that makes us lose focus on more important items but we should know that it's NOT a "myth" and that if we're more susceptible to it at a home brew scale than macro breweries.  We don't want to do overly dumb things that would introduce tons of aeration on the hot side.

-Having said all of that the question of whether me using a drill to aid my whirlpool and chilling is going to be a serious risk of hot side aeration that's an incredibly smart question that I hadn't thought about and now I'm wondering about it...  -I don't know how quickly these hot side aeration reactions take to occur; that would help answer that question. I can get from near boiling to down to 145F in about 5 minutes easily while doing this, but is that long enough for HSA to occur?  Another question: most reaction are accelerated at high temps, is there a temp below which we go that HSA isn't really a concern any more?  -Ex: Can I just wait for my whirlpool kettle+immersion chiller to drop below say 160F and then start to use my drill+mash paddle safely?

I think I'm going to start playing it more safe by letting the wort naturally chill down to say 120F in the whirlpool before I pull out the drill to finish getting it down to 68F.  (So thanks for the feedback; really good point.  I am certainly injecting a TON of air into my wort using the drill mashpaddle whirlpool method.)


Adam

[biertourist]

Not sure I understand the relevance of the question to the topic of wort chillers...

You're right, I could have made it clearer but I was looking at this:

I agree, but if you already have a pump, save a small bit of the copper and make a jamil-style recirculation arm.  (Or if you don't get a 5 euro plastic mash paddle and put it into a cordless power drill and whirlpool the whole volume of wort for the first 6 minutes you're chilling -you'll get down below DMS formation temps EASILY within 6 minutes with the wort whirlpooling.)

Oh... Yea... I should've thought of that.

That's a really good point and you're probably right; I've been overly focusing on speeding up my rate-of-chilling and this is probably a super crazy intense amount of oxygen introduction while the wort is still really hot.  HSA is real and this is probably way too much oxygen introduced at too high of a temp.

i'm going to let the natural whirlpool + immersion chiller get down to 100-120F before I begin to use the mash paddle+drill to get the rest of the way down to yeast pitching temps so I can avoid the risk of hot-side aeration. (I guess I just need to be a little bit more patient.)


I'm expecting 3 batches from now to be using a recirculated counterflow chiller so this will all be a moot point then, but very good point; whipping 8 ppm of oxygen into my wort at high temps is probably a really bad idea.

Adam

[biertourist]

I'm not saying you are wrong but don't both of these points sort of contradict what most experts say these days? IE DMS is something to be worried about and HSA is not.

Certainly contradicts what most commenters on most home brew forums say these days.  Most of the true experts are focused on macro lager production and mega scale breweries and when we take those generalizations of VERY different home brew systems we often leap to the wrong conclusion.

DMS
You don't want DMS but its only a significant concern when a large % of your basemalt is pilsner or lager malt; DMS is rapidly formed and evolved off during a vigorous boil and the precursors only turn to DMS and remain in the beer a temperatures between 145F (estimate from memory but this is definitely within the "Safe zone" and probably bit low) and just below boiling.  The rate of evaporation and therefore DMS evolution is based upon how vigor the boil is and the surface area to volume ratio.

So as long as you have a vigorous 60 min boil in a home-brew sized batch and you rapidly chill your beer from boiling down to 145F or lower you should be good-to-go even with lager malt.  By all means play it safe with a 90 min boil if you want, but DMS is most apparent in light colored beers that will be needlessly darkened by the extended boil, you're also wasting energy and extending your brew day if you do it and you don't need to.


Again, a lot of the focus on DMS has been on the mega US lager producers and they certainly need to worry about DMS; they use not only primarily very lightly kilned lager malts, but the US mega lager producers often use 6 row malt in their cereal cookers and 6 row malt has even more SMM (DMS precursor) than 2 row malt, for Budweiser, they also include corn in their beer, which itself contains DMS so DMS is a big deal there.  They're in a worst-case scenario for DMS, for sure.


The recommendation to do a 90 min boil comes from a study for big breweries that says that at a typical large brewery the "half life" for DMS is 40 minutes, meaning that after a 60 min boil you've reduced 64.7% of the DMS that is in the malt and with a 90 minute boil you've reduced 79% of the DMS.  You start getting into diminishing returns so to fully reduce it would take hours and hours and you'll royally screw up your malt boiling that long (no hope of making light lager for sure).

My problem is that at the same time we know for sure that different brewing systems get rid of DMS MUCH faster. Boil kettles with built in calandrias reduce DMS much faster than normal steam jacketed boil kettles and mega breweries with the "Merlin" system that basically flash boil wort by passing it over a copper inverted cone at boil temps actually can reduce DMS too much so that the beer doesn't even taste like lager any more - big breweries have had to increase their flow rates over Merlin boilers to make sure that they have enough DMS so it still tastes like lager.

-We KNOW that this isn't a "one-size-fits-all" recommendation in the professional space and that it varies based upon your particular boil kettle, but obviously home brewer systems aren't going to be the focus of any funded research...


Having said all of that, I just sent an email to Brad Smith to try and get his source on this "40 minute DMS Half-life" article and I'm going to submit an AHA Research Fund scholarship to try and get someone to lend me the equipment / pay for the lab tests to actually test DMS reduction on a home brew scale now because it just sounds like a lot of fun.




Adam

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

To be honest if it's your own beer and you can't pick up on HSA then why stress about it, once you're not selling it or putting it in for competitions whereby it might make a small difference. Brewers stress over for example skunk flavours and use dark bottles or Tetra hops to reduce it,  but the Mexicans put a slice of lemon in the top of the bottle to hide it and nobody notices :-)

[Qs]

Hydra arrived today (got stung for €50 extra by customs  ). I can't wait to brew now.

[Vermelho]

I ended up building a Jaded Brewing inspired immersion chiller with two coils of 10m copper. It's not the prettiest but it works well. I tested it on a 20 litre batch over the weekend and it chilled to 21C in 12 mins which I was delighted about. I did constant whirlpooling also and the hose feed was over 50' long which probably affected pressure slightly but I'm still fairly pleased. It cost me €72 in total and I had the compression fittings for the ends. I'd say it could be done for €80 or cheaper if you can get good copper pricing, I just used woodies.