OnTap Magazine

SECONDARY TRANSFER 1 USE SENSORY PANELS 3 ERADICATING OXYGEN 1 I f you’re like most homebrewers I know, visiting a craft brewery can be both magical and frustrating. Magical because, well, it’s a big, beautiful brewery. Frustrating because any tour will often whizz past the interesting (for beer nerds anyway) bits: What does that pump do? What is the flow rate for your plate chiller? And how do you re-harvest your yeast? So it’s natural for homebrewers to see their larger, professional cousins as good exemplars to learn from. Surely, the logic goes, if a pro brewer does something, then us homebrewers should follow suit? Well, yes. And no. Let’s take a look at when homebrewers can benefit from following pro brewers and when they should rather go their own way. WHAT TO COPY Pro brewers rightfully go to great lengths to keep their fermenting and fermented beer free of oxygen. When oxygen finds its way into beer, it leads to off-flavours that taste like sherry or cardboard, and even if not noticeable taste-wise, can deteriorate the flavour stability of the final product. In a typical commercial brewery, this is achieved by using sealed pipes (usually stainless steel) to transfer beer and using CO2 to purge transfer pipes, empty fermenters, kegs and bottles. For the homebrewer, installing hermetically sealed stainless steel piping is probably overkill (although...). So how can you keep oxygen out of your homebrew? Here are a few suggestions: • Avoid the temptation of opening your fermenter too frequently. Measure the gravity only after around five to seven days in the fermenter and try not to repeat this process more than is absolutely necessary. • When transferring your beer for bottling, make sure that the racking tube is placed all the way to the bottom of the keg or bottle. • Fill slowly. Don’t splash your beer and don’t rush things. Doing things slowly is the key to avoiding oxygen ruining your beer. • If you have the budget, it is a great idea to use CO2 to purge your bottles or kegs before filling. Simply run CO2 into the bottle or keg for a fewminutes at low pressure (3-5 psi) and (in the case of kegs) vent out the oxygen. Helpfully, CO2 is heavier than oxygen, thus forcing oxygen up and out of the keg/bottle. • If you’re bottling, make sure that you are using oxygen-leaching crown caps and that your crimping is going all the way around the bottle top. • If you’re kegging, check and replace the keg’s seals and o-rings periodically to avoid leaks. Commercial brewers who bottle condition their beers study this process very carefully. It is an easy one to get wrong and when things do go wrong, the results can be pretty disastrous. It often surprises me to see how casual homebrewers can be about bottle conditioning. The thing is, most homebrewers won’t start out with forced carbonation: the equipment costs can be quite steep. And what’s more, one of the great things about homebrew is that yeast does the carbonation heavy-lifting for you. But take a leaf from the pro book on bottle conditioning: Do it properly. Getting this step wrong is a great pity, given how much work you’ve already put into your homebrew. Here are a few pro tips: • Stop using carbonation drops. These are convenient, yes, but they are not as exact as you’d want and are often stale. Rather measure out your priming sugar based on the carbonation you want. Sterilise the sugar by boiling in water and use a separate bottling bucket to rack your beer onto the sugar solution (being aware of the risks of oxidation mentioned above). This will ensure homogenous carbonation throughout your batch. • Condition the beer at room temperature. A common mistake is throwing your beers into the fridge too soon: You have to give the remaining yeast an opportunity to produce enough CO2 to fully carbonate your beer. I recommend at least two weeks at around 18-20°C. • When brewing Belgian style beers, you really do have to add fresh yeast at bottling to get the right flavour profile. This is not just to ensure proper carbonation. Most Belgian styles are high gravity beers, so the added yeast helps to replenish the cells lost in the high alcohol environment of the fermented beer. Professional brewers quickly realise that their own palates can help them only so much. While it’s a good starting point for brewing beer that you’ll enjoy drinking, your own taste is a very limited sample of one. The antidote is to seek out feedback from others. Pros compose sensory panels from sensory analysts and trained beer judges, but you can use just about anybody with a relatively good sense of taste (and smell). Of course, if some of your brewing friends are BJCP or Siebel-accredited beer judges or analysts, so much the better! Sensory panels can really boost your homebrew skills in a number of ways: • Use them to detect off-flavours and consequently, process errors in your brewing practices. • Sense-check (pun intended!) your weird and wonderful recipe ideas (Does basil work in my porter? How about that chilli IPA?). • Check how consistently you can brew the same beer by saving a few batches of the same recipe and having the panel do a blind taste test to see if they can spot the difference between two of the same batch and one that comes from a different batch (known as a triangle test). • Sensory panels can help you understand the real impact of the changes you’ve made to your brewing practices, equipment, or ingredients. Using the above-mentioned triangle test, you can run cool experiments to see what changing ingredients or fermentation schedules does to the finished product. Apart from gathering external feedback from panels, you can also take your beers to homebrewing society meetings, enter homebrew competitions, and seek out BJCP and other accreditation in beer tasting and judging for yourself. WHAT NOT TO COPY Loads of homebrew books will advise you to transfer your wort from the primary fermenter to a secondary vessel (usually a glass carboy) after a few days. This is to copy the pros who transfer their fermented wort into brite tanks (or tap yeast out of the primary conical fermenter). One of the main reasons for this is that in commercial brewing, a whole lot of yeast Sensory panels can really boost your homebrew skills BOTTLE CONDITION LIKE A PRO 2 ontapmag.co.za | Summer 2020 | 59