Republished from BrewingTechniques' September/October 1995.

Protecting Hands in the Brewhouse

A: Brewing is an interesting job. Your hands are wet all the time and often in contact with corrosive cleaning materials or abrasives like diatomaceous earth. That means that unlike most people who work with their hands, you don't build up calluses. Brewers' hands are soft and often raw and sore. And to make matters worse, when you do have to do some dry hand work (moving bags of grain, wheeling a pallet jack, etc.) where calluses would help, your hands aren't ready for it, and they get even more raw.

First suggestion: Get two pairs of gloves - one a good-quality, leather-palmed work glove for dry work, and the other a good pair of chemical-resistant, lined rubber gloves for wet work. I like the leather-palmed work gloves with a knit wristband (stays out of the way) such as Grainger catalog no. 5X903 (men's large size; see the Grainger catalog for other sizes). Most hardware stores also carry a glove of this type. For wet work I like the Neoprene-coated gloves such as the Ansell Edmont Neox brand. The standard-weight, 18-in. gauntlet model (Grainger catalog no. 4T435) is a good choice for brewery work.

Second suggestion: Rubber gloves make you clumsy, especially when trying to put triclamp fittings together. Nonetheless, gloves work only if you wear them, so wear them every time you are handling a corrosive material or solution. There are lots of lightweight gloves out there, and they give a better feel than the stiff, heavy types, but they simply don't hold up in brewery work.

Third suggestion: A pinhole leak renders a glove worthless, so inspect your gloves frequently and replace them as soon as they spring a leak. I suspect that your friend's problems may be due in part to leaky gloves.

Fourth suggestion: Try turning your gloves inside out (except for the fingers) to dry when you're done using them. This helps cut down on odors and fungus.

Fifth suggestion: If your friend continues to have trouble even with faithful use of appropriate gloves, he should consult a dermatologist. Some people have serious trouble with their hands and find that standard protective measures are not enough. If he falls into this category, he needs expert professional help.

Sanitizing Counterflow Wort Chillers

A: First, a little reassurance. It's unlikely that anything was growing in the coil itself. Plastic is much harder to clean than stainless steel. Nonetheless, you are right to reclean and resanitize your wort cooler before using it again. Also, throw out the old plastic hose and get a new one.

As to why something grew in the hose: It can only be because even after your caustic cleaning, some residue remained. Either lengthen your cleaning time, increase the concentration and temperature of the caustic (40 min at 140-160 °F [60-70 °C], with a 2.5% solution recommended), or if you are already following these guidelines increase the pressure you apply during circulation; in other words, get a stronger pump.

How could the iodophor fail? Like any other widely used chemical sanitizer, iodophor is not stable. They all break down with time. Diluted iodophor solutions lose their killing power in three or four days. The loss of power is observable as the solution loses its amber color and turns clear. Once that happens, some organisms can actually feed off the surfactants that are part of the formulation. I have seen mold growing on the surface of a bucket of old iodophor. If your equipment were truly clean, of course, the breakdown of the iodophor would not matter. As it is, if new hoses and a better cleaning regimen do not help, then you will either have to replace your iodophor solution every three or four days, or go to alcohol as a long-term storage solution.

How to Bottle a Flat Beer (Intentionally)

A: You should be able to bottle your beer flat by using nitrogen rather than carbon dioxide for counterpressure during bottling. However, even beer at 55 °F (13 °C) with no head pressure still has some carbonation (about one atmosphere). If that is not enough to cause a problem, your plan should work.

The only problem you might encounter is with fittings and regulators. Nitrogen tank valves have a female thread to ensure that you can't use a carbon dioxide regulator. Your homebrew supplier should be able to order the appropriate adapters to allow you to use your carbon dioxide regulator with a nitrogen cylinder (Foxx Equipment is one source). However, you must buy or rent a special nitrogen cylinder. The pressure in a full nitrogen cylinder is about three times that of a carbon dioxide cylinder.

Late-Conditioning Sulfur Odors

We are having a problem with a sulfur odor that appears in the beer we make in the big, dish-bottomed tanks; it shows up toward the end of the conditioning stage. We clean and sanitize all our tanks the same way, using caustic and iodophor or peroxyacetic acid. We use the same yeast strain for all the beer. We can't figure out where this sulfury odor is coming from. Any ideas?

A: If you had an infection, it would most likely appear in all your fermentors - assuming that you harvest and repitch the yeast back and forth between the two types of tanks. In any case your CIP (clean-in-place) regimen sounds OK, though I'd recommend going to an acid wash step between the caustic and the sanitizer. The importance of an acid rinse is underappreciated. An acid rinse not only dissolves beerstone deposits (which caustic does not), but it also neutralizes caustic, ensuring that no caustic residue remains to neutralize (and therefore render ineffective) an acid sanitizer.

The fact that you have the problem only in the one type of tank, however, and not in the other is suggestive. Yeast autolysis gives rise to some really nasty sulfury odors, and that may be what you are experiencing. My guess is that your bigger tanks, with a shallow-dished bottom, are not managing to keep the layer of yeast cold enough to prevent it from autolyzing. That would account for the fact that the problem arises only toward the end of the conditioning rest. For whatever reasons - better cooling perhaps - your 20-bbl cylindroconicals are doing a better job of keeping the yeast layer cold.

If you want confirmation you might submit samples of the slurry from both types of tank (both samples at the same end stage of conditioning, of course) to a brewery laboratory for analysis and microscopic examination. That would settle the issue.

If the problem is autolysis, you are in a bit of a pickle. You cannot pull the yeast slurry out the bottom of a dished tank as you can from a conical-bottomed tank. Your only recourse may be to go to a two-vessel fermentation, separating the beer from the yeast slurry before conditioning.

Metallic tastes in beers

A: Yes it could. If you've been following the articles about stainless steel in BrewingTechniques recently (2-4), you know that what makes stainless steel stainless is a layer of tough oxides on the surface. That layer can be removed if you abrade the surface enough - for example, by bearing down with a metal scouring pad or a wire brush. If you strip off the oxide layer, what is underneath is mostly steel, which is mostly iron, and this iron could get into your wort and give it a metallic taste.

I suggest soaking your kettle for a while using TSP or a metasilicate-based cleaner. Scrub it only with a nonmetal kitchen scrub pad. That method should enable you to get it clean. It will not, however, restore the oxide layer.

To restore the oxide layer (see reference 2 for a discussion of passivation), you will have to recondition the stainless with an acid. I suggest using a high-foam phosphoric acid-based cleaner. Scrub the kettle well with this solution - don't forget to wear rubber gloves - and then let the foam stand in contact with the metal. After 10 minutes whip up the foam again and scrub some more. Repeat this four more times, for a total contact time of one hour.

I suggest repeating this acid treatment after your next three or four brews; then you can go back to a shorter cleaning regimen. It would be a good idea, however, to use a short acid treatment periodically on the kettle following the alkaline cleaner. You need not do this every brew, but doing it every third or fourth brew will help keep your stainless in good shape.

Scaling, Agar, Cleaning, and Sour-Mashing

A: First, the only problems with going to 3-gal batches are connected with vessel size. If you are an all-grain brewer, you may find that the depth of the grain bed in your lauter tun is too shallow, making it difficult to clarify the wort. Similarly, if you use 5-gal carboys as secondary fermentors, you will have a problem with 2 gal of headspace above your beer. The only way to deal with the lauter tun problem may be to make a smaller one. For fermentation, try using the 5-gal carboy for a single-stage fermentation.

Second, I've never heard of "parave" nonmeat, nondairy kosher gelatin, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be agar. The vegetarian gelatin sold in health food stores is just that and used to be recommended for home brewers who needed small amounts of agar. What does the label say? Perhaps some BrewingTechniques readers can help here.

These days, mail-order suppliers can provide you with malt-extract agar petri dishes and test tube slants ready-made for culturing yeast. Because of the high failure rate and general hassles of pouring your own agar plates (condensation, mold growth, and so forth), I feel the ready-made ones are a good investment, especially for beginners.

Third, if you don't want to boil a brass implement you can use iodophor to sanitize it. A 10-min soak should do. Just remember, no amount of sanitizer will work if the thing is not clean. That means disassembling and scrubbing it out with a small brush, or else pumping cleaning solution through it.

Fourth, nothing works wonderfully well on a Bruheat element. Every one I've seen that's been used for any length of time was crusty-looking and discolored. However, you don't need to restore the shiny-new appearance. All you need to do is keep it clean enough so that you get reasonable heat transfer. For that, trisodium phosphate and a nonmetal kitchen scrubbing pad work well enough.

Fifth, the problem with adding sour beer - beer that you have inoculated with a Lactobacillus strain - to a stout to get that authentic Guinness character is that the sourness will continue to increase in the bottle or keg unless you have managed to get rid of the live bacteria that soured the beer in the first place. In other words, you have to stabilize the sour beer before blending it. I suggest using a sterile filter. Note that only the sour beer needs to be filtered.

The problem is that a sterile filter is about 0.22 micron - very tight - and will plug up quickly. The best arrangement is to use a rough filter to remove the majority of the haze, yeast, and so forth, and a separate sterile cartridge filter to take out any remaining bacteria.

A sour mash is appealing because you don't need to do a separate sour brew for blending, and there are no worries about continued souring of the finished beer; the souring organisms are killed off later in the process during the wort boil. The trade-off for this simplicity in the process is the difficulty in getting consistent results. Sour mashing is hard to control. It's tough to get just a hint of sourness, which is what you need for the typical Guinness taste.

The best approach may be to combine the two tactics we have been talking about; that is, make a batch of sour beer by the sour-mash method (the finished beer will be inherently stable) and store this beer in a keg, refrigerated, and use it to blend with your unsoured batches of stout. This system will give you both control and stability while avoiding the hassles of sterile-filtering sour beer.

References

(2) Micah Millspaw, "The Care and Feeding of Stainless Steel," BrewingTechniques 2 (4), 44-47 (1994).

(3) Jeff Donaghue, "A Primer on Welding Stainless Steel," BrewingTechniques 2 (5), 52-55 (1994).

(4) John Palmer, "Brazing and Welding 304L Stainless Steel," BrewingTechniques 2 (6), 50-55 (1994).

(5) Charlie Papazian, The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing (Avon Books, New York, 1991), pp. 349-352.