I have been no chilling wort for the last half dozen beers and then corny fermenting the last three. I am ready to transfer cooled wort today. The thought occurred to me “Why not pitch to the covered BV and ferment then transfer to serving keg?” Basement is 66F and I have a cooling jacket to keep it there.
There is little O2 in BV. What is there will be pushed out the lid the first 24 hrs. It has been covered since 5 min before I got ready to flame out. No O2 transfer will make a nearly zero O2 exposure.
It is an 8 g MegaPot with thermometer and outlet. Easy to refractometer test a no O2 sample.
Gravity transfer to double purged keg. If it goes smoothly a couple times I could silicone gasket the lid, add some weight to the lid and make a ball lock port in the lid for capturing CO2 to purge keg.
Anyone done this before? I am sure some have. What could go wrong?
Are you forgetting about the yeast’s need for O2 in the early stage of fermentation? Unless you aerate/oxygenate post boil, there’ll be very little O2 in solution. You might get away with your plan using a healthy pitch of dry yeast, but not if you use liquid.
The challenges that I see: 1) you will be fermenting on the entirety of the trub. Some trub is fine, but all of it? Not sure how that final beer would taste. 2) Given that all the spent hops will be in the fermenter, you better hope that outlet doesn’t clog. 3) There will be a CO2 blanket only while CO2 is being created. Once fermentation ends and that positive pressure goes away, you will get oxygen ingress, as you are not in a sealed fermenter. You’d want to monitor that gravity closely and transfer as soon as it’s stable.
But overall I see no reason why this wouldn’t work well.
I thought about trub being as issue but I vorlauf for 15 or 20 minutes at a slow rate. I imagine it helps complete conversion and I can see almost no husk and diminished smaller particles in these worts. There is a small amount of smaller particle hops that escaped the pellet bags, but it really is just an incomplete skim on the bottom of the pot. I am a little concerned about the break being in there. I imagine it might cause some hazing. Does the protein impact flavor?
I first heard of fermenting in the kettle 25 years ago. The great Jeff Renner was doing it. Since then I’ve heard many others doing it. Go right ahead.
I know there is nothing that hasn’t been thought of, forgotten and rediscovered many times. It still is fun and entertaining juggling all the variables.
Anvil had a special gasket that it sold with its 10 gallon boil kettle to allow for fermenting in the kettle (airlock on a grommetted hole in the lid). I did it a couple times without incident, but have not really made it a steady practice. It turned out fine, by the way.
One of the guys in our brew club does this with his kviek beers in his robobrew. Once it’s cool, set temp to 38c then pitch. I don’t think he does it with other styles, just the kviek ones. He’s had no issues at all
I don’t think it’s much of a problem for the OP’s plan, but positive CO2 pressure doesn’t keep oxygen out of a imperfectly sealed vessel. Consider that even a capped bottle of carbonated beer is subject to slow oxygen ingress through the sealing insert of the crown cap.
I might have to try this as well and add in no-chilling to the process. A 3-gallon batch along these lines might be a nice experiment that removes quite a few time-intensive steps to the process. Why not?
