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Brewing Update, Oxygen Injection
Well, it's been a week since I brewed a 5 gallon batch of American Pale Ale and another 5 gallon batch of American Brown Ale. As mentioned in my last post, these were the first two batches where I used my new 02 tank to hopefully get a more robust fermentation...well, my milage apparently varied.
Both batches used dry yeasts, the Brown having Nottingham, the Pale Ale having US-5. Normally Nottingham by itself has a very good fermentation, and in the past if I've used the complete yeast cake from a 5 gallon ferment, the lid always blows...so I'm figuring that I'll get something in between a normal fermentation and a mild explosion injecting oxygen into the wort. Well, I must say that after a week of fermentation I can tell no noticible differance. No exciting fermentation, no popped off airlocks, and certainly no lid exploding. I'm racking both brews into secondary this afternoon or tomorrow, so we'll see what if any differance the oxygen made in the taste of the beers.
My "injection system" at this point consists of my having a tiny plastic fitting stuck into a hole in my racking tube. I started the wort racking from boil kettle into fermenter, and turned on the oxygen, so it was bubbling into the entire batch as it racked from one vessel to the other. Maybe this wasn't getting the oxygen "into" the wort...I'll order and try a diffusing stone and then perhaps that will give me differant results, but I figured that bubbling the entire batch with pure oxygen during the racking would surely equal the oxygen content of a 20-30 second blast from a diffusing stone. Perhaps I was wrong.