KMBS for brewing

[Aksarben]

Just curious as to why you don't use KMBS (Potassium Metabisulfite ) in the beer after it has finished in fermenting or for the secondary? We use it all the time in the wine industry to stabilize the wine and prevent either oxidation or growth of undesirable organisms.

 

[GFHomebrew]

I hear it being used before brewing to reduce disolved oxygen and to help sterilise water and reduce chloramine levels in brew water.

But I'm sure this potassium meatabysulphste kills the ye yeasties so maybe undesirable in bottle conditioning and in lagers where the yeast continue to work their magic in the beer as its Lagering.

 

[jeffpn]

Yup. You won’t get the fizzies in your bottle if you use that. Maybe not a big deal if you keg, but that’s a wine thing, not a beer thing.

 

[Nosybear]

Just curious as to why you don't use KMBS (Potassium Metabisulfite ) in the beer after it has finished in fermenting or for the secondary? We use it all the time in the wine industry to stabilize the wine and prevent either oxidation or growth of undesirable organisms.

Could be possible if kegging. Bottle conditioning adversely impacted as above. A side effect: Sulfur odors, very undesirable in most beers. Wife and I do wine as well and have thought about this. So far we've not used meta in beer.

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

we boil and wine doesn't

 

[Aksarben]

I figured that boiling was the main deterent against microbes. Wine comes in with lots of stuff and 50-75 ppm will take care quite a bit of it and wild yeasts are more sensitive to SO2 than cultured. Now we do have SO2 levels in sparkling wine before it goes into bottle fermentation. So cultured "wine" yeasts are somewhat tolerant of SO2 to a point. I can measure both free and total SO2 in wine. i do not know about beer yeasts and their tolerance to SO2. PDM yeast is fairly tolerant and used as a starter yeast for sparkling wines, and they have a lot more pressure than does beer. However, we also add certain amounts of yeast food YAN that yeast utilize in the bottle.

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

I use Potassium Metabisulfite (im allergic by the way) to clean my water before I start and it does work great, even gets rid of chlorine but the main thing we do in beer is use sanitizers like crazy, boil then more sanitizers on everything the wort touches, we try not to incorporate any oxygen until fermentation and use special salts to change the water for taste only, then nutrients for fermentation and special yeast for the type of beer were brewing, theres so many options it can get overwhelming but usually people stick with what works for them and don't change, I would check out the new book from John J. Palmer and brush up on the differences

 

[jeffpn]

What aren’t you allergic to, OMB?

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

thats the key with me, not what am I, what am I not lol . like the canary in the mines I'm the canary human, if I die first everyone is screwed lol

 

[wobdee]

I've been putting a pinch about 6mg/l in my kegs for about two years now mostly just a little insurance against oxidation. My kegs have been good to the last drop.

 

[jeffpn]

My kegs have been good to the last drop.

Mine too!

 

[Aksarben]

.... I would check out the new book from John J. Palmer and brush up on the differences

I have, in books, How to Brew" by John J. Palmer, "Brewing Classic Styles" by Jamil Zainasheff , "Big Book of Brewing" by Dave Line, "Brewing Porters & Stouts" by Terry Foster, and " The Brew Your Own - Big Book of Homebewing: All-Gfrain and Extract Brewing". So I've got some reading to do.

With wine, you have an acid environment and low pH that is inhospitible to most undesired organisms, and when finished at 11+ % alcohol, that, too helps. Also red wine has tannins and other antrocyanins that have an inhibitory effect as well. Our biggest concerns come from Brett and wild Malolactic bacteria, although we do inoculate with ML Bacteria for the conversion of Malic to Lactic acid.

Beer uses grains, not fruit, and as such I am finding it is a whole another world.

Nice thing about grains, is they aren't affected by late spring frosts or early fall frosts, keep in the dry natural or malted form very well when dry. And you control the sugar by the amounts of grains, not depending on when the grapes have attained correct ripeness. They're always ripe!

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

great, yes with grain the only thing to worry about is you have to have a certain moisture level in the grain other than that it can last for years which is nice

 

[Nosybear]

I have, in books, How to Brew" by John J. Palmer, "Brewing Classic Styles" by Jamil Zainasheff , "Big Book of Brewing" by Dave Line, "Brewing Porters & Stouts" by Terry Foster, and " The Brew Your Own - Big Book of Homebewing: All-Gfrain and Extract Brewing". So I've got some reading to do.

With wine, you have an acid environment and low pH that is inhospitible to most undesired organisms, and when finished at 11+ % alcohol, that, too helps. Also red wine has tannins and other antrocyanins that have an inhibitory effect as well. Our biggest concerns come from Brett and wild Malolactic bacteria, although we do inoculate with ML Bacteria for the conversion of Malic to Lactic acid.

Beer uses grains, not fruit, and as such I am finding it is a whole another world.

Nice thing about grains, is they aren't affected by late spring frosts or early fall frosts, keep in the dry natural or malted form very well when dry. And you control the sugar by the amounts of grains, not depending on when the grapes have attained correct ripeness. They're always ripe!

Too much reading, I'd say! All that, you're going to get a bunch of different ideas, notions, facts and procedures. Start with the first couple chapters of Palmer's book - extract brewing. Or one of the others, just pick one and go with it for a while. Then try one of the others. I'd recommend a simple pale ale or blonde as a first effort, if you can do those well the others will fall in line. Then read those weighty homebrewing tomes - it'll make a lot more sense then. My wife and I do wine as well as beer, beer is much more complex to produce! The world stops being different once you have oxygenated wort - control the fermentation temperature for best results!

 

[jeffpn]

I have 2 homebrewing books, both written by Charlie P. And one book is the successor to the other, I think. I completely read the first one a couple decades ago. I never got through the second one.

 

[GFHomebrew]

I actually have no homebrew books in paper form anyhow I pursue the "all knowing" web and try to decipher the truth from the BuL&@&t.

@Aksarben what sort of PH do you end up with in your (Must) is it called? The beer yeast do a pretty good job at dropping the PH in fermentation to around 4 ph which is undesirable for a lot of bad bacteria.

 

[Mase]

If you are just starting out, Google and YouTube are your best friend. Another good resource (if you are in the states) is Northern Brewer. When you call them, you can select the option to speak to a "Brew Master". Although they may not technically be Brew Masters, they are very helpful. Lucky for you, you found this site/forum early on and there's a lot of experienced Brewers here that are very helpful.

 

[Aksarben]

I actually have no homebrew books in paper form anyhow I pursue the "all knowing" web and try to decipher the truth from the BuL&@&t.

@Aksarben what sort of PH do you end up with in your (Must) is it called? The beer yeast do a pretty good job at dropping the PH in fermentation to around 4 ph which is undesirable for a lot of bad bacteria.

The grape juice "must" is generally around 3.30, but I have fermented some varieties of grapes at 2.90 and others around 3.65 but the bulk of the juice for fermenting is between the ranges of 3.25 to 3.50. If it gets too high and the acid will generally be too low, we add Tartaric acid to lower the pH. We ferment a LOT of apple cider for outside winery concerns and us as well, somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 gallons/ year. Most of it comes in deficient in acid and a high pH so to that we add Malic acid, the natural acid of apples. We can get in a tanker of 5400 gallons of apple juice and the pH would be up around 3.70 (or higher) and acid around 0.300 so we would add 0.3% malic, which amount to quite a bit of Malic acid.

I took a small sample of my wort to work yesterday and checked it with out pH meter and it is 6.03 pH, and 12.3 brix = 1.0496 S.G. I used the water I bring home from the winery lab and kitchen water, which is run through a water softner with bead to remove calcium and tannins, and use that. However, the water around here is fairly low pH (why we grow so many blueberries), so I added a tablespoon (heaping) of CaCO3 to my 3 gal of water I used to make up the CBW Special Dark LME wort.

 

[Nosybear]

The grape juice "must" is generally around 3.30, but I have fermented some varieties of grapes at 2.90 and others around 3.65 but the bulk of the juice for fermenting is between the ranges of 3.25 to 3.50. If it gets too high and the acid will generally be too low, we add Tartaric acid to lower the pH. We ferment a LOT of apple cider for outside winery concerns and us as well, somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 gallons/ year. Most of it comes in deficient in acid and a high pH so to that we add Malic acid, the natural acid of apples. We can get in a tanker of 5400 gallons of apple juice and the pH would be up around 3.70 (or higher) and acid around 0.300 so we would add 0.3% malic, which amount to quite a bit of Malic acid.

I took a small sample of my wort to work yesterday and checked it with out pH meter and it is 6.03 pH, and 12.3 brix = 1.0496 S.G. I used the water I bring home from the winery lab and kitchen water, which is run through a water softner with bead to remove calcium and tannins, and use that. However, the water around here is fairly low pH (why we grow so many blueberries), so I added a tablespoon (heaping) of CaCO3 to my 3 gal of water I used to make up the CBW Special Dark LME wort.

6.03 pH sounds very high - normal range for new wort should be 5.2 - 5.6, for boiled wort should be 5.0 - 5.4, finished beer should be around 4.3. Water pH is not very important, it's the mash pH - the enzymes work best in certain ranges, outside of the ranges you run into clarification issues, an alkaline beer tastes flat and lifeless. Softened water, if you're using ion exchange softening, is very high in sodium, too high for beer, and adding calcium carbonate to water is mostly useless unless you acidify or carbonate the water - it just won't dissolve and can result in calcium phosphate precipitation leading to gushers. Water is about the most complex aspect of brewing, I'd reserve it for a lot later. Start with an extract brew, use distilled or RO water and you'll make good beer. We all learn as we go and all of us have a tendency to want to jump in over our heads.

I should be getting some Aromella juice either today or next week to do some hobby wine. I may be asking your advice on that....

 

[Mase]

As I am on well water that is high in iron. enough that you can taste it from time to time, I only use bottled spring water. I've been using Deer Park bottled spring water and my mash pH has been in a fairly tight range of 5.0 to 5.4 using bottled spring water.

@ Nosy: Using distilled or RO water, from my google and YouTube experience, doesn't have enough minerals and nutrients in them to assure good yeast health. Are you saying you disagree?