I’m a hydrator of dry yeast too. It’s important to note that the yeast should be hydrated in plain tap water not RO, distilled or otherwise. I get krausen in 8 hours so I’m wondering if the “stripping” of FAN has that much impact vs cell wall destruction.
Does hot side aeration actually matter pre-boil?
And to answer the vorlauf question. Usually a quart or less to set the grain-bed and vorlauf. I float a plastic lid and gently pour the vorlauf onto it and the bed isn’t disturbed. From now on I’ll skip this.
i have also made starters from partial packets of dry yeast. i know this is frowned upon, but in my world it is not much different than repitching a yeast slurry from a previous batch.
The vorlauf will help you eliminate chunks of grain & husk that could otherwise add tannins, get scorched, or promote additional matter that you don’t want/need.
I use a 10-gallon Rubbermaid cooler with stainless braid.
I typically run 2 to 3 quarts, because I run into a gallon pitcher & there’s room to do so.
I place a receiving kettle under the tun, place my gallon pitcher into the kettle & put the hose into the pitcher.
When the runnings look quite clear, I drop the hose into the kettle & very slowly pour the initial runnings into the rear of the tun.
No fuss.
Addition:
HSA isn’t going to occur from the mild treatment involved in most vorlaufing.
But, you could possibly be pushing your luck with that straining method.
That said…I believe HSA exists, but have never noticed it in my brews, or anyone else’s.
…Kinda like the way I believe in sasquatch.
Theoretically it does create oxidized compounds that are not volatilized during the boil. In practice normal handling of the wort doesn’t seem to have much of an effect. At least not at the homebrew level.
I mash in a 5-gallon Rubbermaid cooler (trimmed with blue painter’s tape to increase efficiency) using a foot-long (I think) “Denny braid.” I always end up vorlaufing because I don’t know if I need to vorlauf until I’ve poured off a couple of cups of wort, at which point, I is vorlaufing. It’s usually between 3 and 4 cups because I use a 4-cup Pyrex. In my opinion, based on what I see, the vorlauf is usually unnecessary, but it’s not like it takes much effort, and then I get to throw around words like “vorlauf.”
I have become a dry yeast sprinkler, simply to avoid one more contamination opportunity. My beers rarely exceed 1.070. My ales always kick off with great enthusiasm. My stouts never do, and also finish too high. Hmmm. But now we have a hybrid thread…
I brew alot of partigyle brews and I have only one kettle that is big enough to hold a preboil volume of wort, even for the small beer. So I run my first runnings off into the boil kettle, get that on the burner and then run off the second runnings into a bucket. When the first boil is over I pour the second runnings into the kettle. I take 0 precautions against HSA and have never noticed any problems. I have not entered any contests so perhaps I am just missing it but…
I agree with you. I’ve read / heard interviews where people who know what they are talking about (Bamforth, Fix, etc) say it exists, but I’ve never had a problem with it and I’m not especially careful about it.
On the last episode of “Drinking Made Easy”, they were at the Allagash brewery in Maine. As soon as the boil was over they were pumping hot wort from the boil kettle to a large open fermenter. It dropped about 6 ft to the fermenter; splashing & foaming all over the place. I thought if HSA was real, this should be it.
unless they purge the fermenter. I imagine there is a time aspect to it as well.
as I understand oxidation first you introduce o2 then, over some period of time, that o2 interacts with other compounds in the wort/beer causing unpleasant or unwanted flavours/aromas. the higher the temp (within a limit) the faster these reactions occur. The higher the level of disolved o2 the faster and more extreme these reactions occur. and the longer the disolved o2 stays in the wort/beer and the wort/beer stays at an elevated temperature the more these reactions occur.
so when I pour my hot wort from a bucket to the kettle I am introducing o2 and oxidation reactions commence. I then add heat which drives off disolved o2 until it reaches a boil when pretty much all the o2 is removed from the solution thus halting the reaction quickly.
with allagash they pump the hot wort into the fermenter where o2 is introduced and reactions commence. they immediatly begin cooling the wort via what ever chilling method they use thus slowing the reactions and then add yeast which remove much of the remaining o2 in fairly short order.
Perhaps if you agitated your hot wort and then let it sit overnight you would notice some effects. I am unlikely to try this experimen.
I do think vorlauf is important and with my toilet connector, usually drain about 1 qt before clear.
I agree with Tom that pouring back the vorlauf is not a major issue as long as you are not disturbing the bottom half of the mash.
I have experienced HSA before buying a IC. If you splash the wort around violently while it is over 95F, it can happen.
The only effect I have experienced from HSA is haze.
I don’t think HSA matters as much pre-boil but I try to not splash the beer around anyway.
Glad this came up. The question that immediately comes to my mind is whether the paltry amount of supposed grain husks that you collected in that “qt. or less” would have any perceptible impact on the finished beer. Just talking out my a**, I say “no”. I think this is one of those time honored homebrew bugaboos that probably hasn’t ever really been questioned, let alone, tested. I mean, what quantity of grain husks in a boil kettle would it really take for tannins to be detectible in the finished beer? I suspect a lot more than you could ever collect in that quart container by way of a hose braid. Do I vorlauf?..yeah…for now anyway.
As for the cloudy wort issue, when I was having stuck sparge issues, out of frustration, I stirred the mash 3-4 times during the runoff. Nice, cloudy wort poured into my kettle, but no husks that I could see. Anyway, the pilsener came out clear as a bell.
I pretty much agree with both of you. There certainly doesn’t look like much “stuff” in the portion I vorlauf, and I suspect that it would have minimal, if any, impact if I didn’t. OTOH, it’s so fast and easy that I’ll probably continue to do it “just in case”.
That’s how I feel about it too. For the small effort and very little time it takes, and certainly posing no risk to the beer, its nice to have clear wort and practically zero husk material going into the kettle.
I’m always open to try something new and not afraid of change, but this is one of those little things to which I’ll probably always stubbornly cling.
Yeah, I’m with you on this, but you could say the same thing about shaking a lucky rabbit’s foot over the kettle, i.e., it only requires a “small effort and very little time…, and certainly pos[es] no risk to the beer”. Just saying that I’ve never really seen any data quantifying the husk/tannin extraction problem on a homebrew level. So, I don’t really have a reason for the vorlauf, even though I employ it myself. So, at this point, for me, the vorlauf is akin to the lucky rabbit’s foot that has never been seriously tested (unless one wishes to consider my stirring the mash during the runoff as a test).
I wonder if this is not a little similar to the “trub in the fertmenter/autolysis” problem which seems to be slowly becoming no problem as more people are becoming less concerned with trub in primary, even to the exclusion of employing secondary fermentation. This is just something I’ve noticed more and more on forums.
I think it’s more of a case that the “conventional homebrew wisdom” of years past was based on what homebrewers observed commercial brewers doing. Rather than questioning whether those lessons were valid, older homebrew books simply related the conventional wisdom. I know that’s what it seemed like with the books I started reading 14 years ago. As more people start homebrewing and communicating via forums like this, that wisdom gets questioned, the questions get tested, and the info passed along. Some of that wisdom is valid for what we do and some isn’t. With this issue, you could do back to back batches, vorlauf one but not the other, and do a blind tasting of the results. I’ll be waiting for your conclusions!
I have a “belt and suspenders” kinda personality sometimes, so yeah, I probably still would. Every once in a while I get more “stuff” coming out than I anticipated and there’s no way for me to tell when that will happen. Since it’s quick and easy, I/d rather do it than wish that I would have done it. OTOH, if I was one of the guys I read about who vorlauf several gal. I’d probably reconsider that.
