So we’re sitting around at work today, playing with dry ice that we receive as refrigerant for drug shipments and started thinking… When you drop it in water, the gas it emits is CO2. I’ve read a bit here and there about people using dry ice for various things in brewing. I wonder if you could use it to create a CO2 blanket in fermenters and bottling buckets and to purge bottles when bottling?
You could get a sports bottle with a flexible straw and attach a hose, and direct it into bottles, fermenters or buckets. I wonder if it would make enough of a difference and will it remain in the fermenter bottle or whatever long enough to make it effective. Any thoughts?
It would work. You don’t need water either, it just heats faster in water than air. I’m not sure it’s a pragmatic answer though unless you have a free surplus of dry ice since it’s expensive to buy. It might also be difficult to manage since you can’t control the flow. You’d get a burst when you add a chunk, then it would fizzle quickly.
This is how a lot of rootbeer recipes handle carbonating the batch for an afternoon party. Basically add water to round cooler, add extract, lower in block of dry ice and start adding sugar. The bubbling mixes the sugar in and carbs the soda at the same time. Once all the sugar is added, spin the top on until all the dry ice is thawed (very important step!!) and serve.
Like others have said it would be a very expensive way to carb your beverages if you couldn’t get it for free.
If you purge bottles with nitrogen rather than CO2, then you will lose CO2 from solution into the headspace after bottling. I’m not sure if it’s enough to be a concern, but it’s definitely something to do the math on before converting your brewery.
It would be cool if they manufactured a small device that would use air gun co2 cartridges that one could use for small items like bottles… of course it’s for us poor fools who don’t have the ability to keg or have a beer gun.
Since I don’t keg, I use this stuff after transferring to the secondary. Is all the o2 removed from the headspace? No, but it is reduced. I was kidding about blowing through a millipore filter.
