Sun Jan 21, 2007 6:50 pm
This is slightly off the direction of this thread, but I thought it fit within the confines of the topic:
After listening to the Brewcasters' various opinions on aeration, I decided to alter my method - which had always been to avoid any aeration of my wort because I had no diffusion stone or filter and was afraid of exposing my virgin wort to horny bugs. So I never even shook the carboy, and I had many years of successful brewing, with lag times that averaged 12 to 24 hours.
Then I learned that any type of aeration is better than none at all, so I started shaking my starters and my carboys before pitching. My lag times definitely decreased, and I sometimes noticed more vigorous-ly krausen, leading me to the use of a blowoff tube for the first time. So things seemed to have improved.
However, at tasting, I have noticed that I have had slight to moderate contamination of several of these beers. My sanitization has always been good... I had never had to dump a batch until this point. But now I was getting beer with a funky, sourish taste - so I'm guessing that the shaking was the culprit.
So, I spent the 30 bucks for an aquarium pump, filter, and stone. I was happy to no longer have to shake the carboys, though my first few tries with the stone led to foam overflows. But my lag times became even shorter, so I was happy. I have tasted the two beers, and they seems nice and clean.
So, I must very respectfully disagree with the idea that shaking is better than nothing. Mind you, I ferment in a somewhat dank basement, so who knows what's floating around down there. But I'd be hard pressed to ever be lacksadasical about letting unfiltered air touch my wort ever again, regardless of what anyone says. I'd advise any intermediate brewer to invest in the aquarium pump solution - it's one of the cheapest upgrades for an intermediate brewer, and you don't run the risk of over-oxygenating as you might with straight oxygen. Anyone else have similar findings?
