Homebrew Beer Blog

I’ve been having a horrible time with ethyl acetate in my lagers. It’s so strange. I’ve brewed 10 lagers in 2007, all but two, an extract brew and a grain with its harvest yeast, had the defect. I’ve tried all sorts of things, to no avail, so now it’s time for 1 gallon batches.

Sunday I brewed up a Belgian pale, and make up a few extra gallons for experiments. I normally use WLP830 and 833, but the brew store only had 838, so hopefully that won’t mess things up. I'm testing a few things here. One the affect of yeast nutrient, affect of pure O2, and the affect of my starter process. Also, it looks like I'll test trub in the fermenter too since I got particularly good trub seperation. All but #1 has very little trub from the fermenter. I estimate about 2/3 a vial will give my 1.5 million cells/ml/Plato, which has been my typical pitching rate. No nutrient was added to the boil, I manually added about 4 times (0.7g) the typical addition to the control fermenter. All have been pitched and sitting at 48-50 degrees. I’ll hit each except the shaking fermenter with O2 every 7-9 hours until I see activity.

#1 = Control. Added 0.7 g yeast nutrient, pure 02, 2/3 a vial.
#2 = Shaking for O2. I just put a cap on it and shook it for a few minutes, 2/3 vial
#3 = Pure O2, 2/3 vial
#4 = Pure O2, 35 ml of loose 833 slurry from previous affected batch.