Anyone have experience with combining olive oil and a bit of crude aeration when pitching the yeast?
I often carboy-shake my lower gravity ales (<1.045) simply because it’s easy. When I move the carboy around on one of those potted plant rollers, getting a sustained, cascading slosh is no trouble.
Well I thought I’d combine that carboy shaking with a drop of olive oil to service a higher gravity wort (1.075). Super easy but is there sufficient aeration or benefit to combining the two practices? Of course just getting and using an O2 canister, valve and stone wouldn’t be too tough but I do like the lo-tech approach.
Experience with or an informed opinion regarding? Thanks and cheers!
I have yet to see any real evidence that OO does anything the way homebrewers use it. The single experiment I’ve seen at the homebrew level reached the conclusion after blind tasting that the tasters preferred non OO beers.
From what I understand OO is only usable in beer if you pre-dissolve it. It won’t mix in with beer and therefore won’t be usable by the yeast. You would need to pre-dissolve it in ethanol so that it will mix into the beer. Also, it’s only a miniscule amount that is needed, so it becomes a challenge to measure it accurately for a typical 5 gallon batch.
Interesting. My process is adding a drop of oil to a shot of vodka and swirling it around, breaking it up into smaller droplets. Add one or two of those tiny droplets to the yeast starter and blend that up, pitch starter into wort and then shake the blasphemy out of it.
Didn’t think of solubility as a factor. I’ll do a bit more reading.