Racking and 0xidation

Brewing processes and methods. How to brew using extract, partial or all-grain. Tips and tricks.

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cubangoose
Light Lager
Light Lager
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Racking and 0xidation

Post by cubangoose »

Schlach's post made me think. I have been racking all of me beer into 6.5 gallon carboys. Does that extra headspace really allow enough oxidation to significantly influence the taste of the finished beer? I have heard that remaining Co2 purges the oxygen from the carboy. Is that true?
I have decided that I am going to rack my next batch into 2 separate carboys; a 1 gallon carboy filled clear to the top and the other ( 6.5 gallon ) with at least two gallons headspace. I will allow them both to sit for 10 days and will bottle them and see if I can taste a difference in the two. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Has anyone tried this?
schlach
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Joined: Sun Jan 02, 2005 10:15 pm

An interesting experiment...

Post by schlach »

i would suggest that you make every attempt to eliminate other variables as well. For example, temperature, sunlight, sanitation, but also the beer itself. I don't have enough experience to say for sure, but I would be curious to know whether taking the first or the last gallon of the beer from the primary (closest to / furthest from the trub) would provide a noticeable difference.

My conclusions from the replies on the other post was that, as long as I didn't frequently disturb the 6.5 gallon carboy, very little oxidation would occur. You might also want to consider how frequently you think you'll be opening the fermentation lock to take a sample in your future batches, and then use that frequency of sampling on both of your test carboys. So if you want to sample every two days, do that on both, and see if that causes a noticeable difference. My hunch is that, without frequent sampling, any differences in your beer will be undetectable. It would be interesting to see if a 2-day disturbance cycle affected that (but then, that implies running the test twice...)

Very interesting idea. Look forward to hearing the results.

cheers,

schlach
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