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Best Process for Naturally Carbonated Beer

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  • Best Process for Naturally Carbonated Beer

    Hi All,

    I'm a newbie to Pro and still in the planning stages of our 3bbl brewery. I've been homebrewing for about 5 years with really good success. One of the things that I always enjoy about my homebrew is the natural carbonation vs. force carbonated beer and I'd like to carry this forward into my professional operation.

    I'd like to understand options of going direct from the fermenter (Looking at using 3bbl/6bbl Stout Tanks and Brewmation for Electric Brewery) after primary fermentation to 5 gal kegs and allow the beer to condition at 68-70 degrees for a week or so then move to cold storage for a week or so prior to shipping out or serving in my taproom.

    The alternative would be to use a brite tank but I'm not clear on how I would go about replicating the naturally carbonated process with a brite tank. It seems most everything I read about brite's is around forced carbonation.

    This is a really great forum and I'm really excited to join the Craft Beer industry! This is an industry that is not only about a great quality product but it is also has a unique culture and is full of amazing people!

    I appreciate any insights folks can give me on this as we continue to kick the tires on our ideas.

    Thanks!

  • #2
    Providing your fermenters can handle it, you could use a spundig and carb naturally in your fermenter. Alternatively you could bottle or keg condition priming with corn sugar or dry malt like you would at home or via krausening, which works but is a bit of a hassle.

    My choice for natural carb on a large scale is via spundig

    Comment


    • #3
      Sounds interesting, is naturally carbonated beer the selling point for your brewery? We prime and pitch so that we can re-ferment in bottles and sometimes we keg what we have left. These kegs are then allowed to re-ferment. We also do firkins which are always nice. You will need to do a lot of experimentation to figure out what works for you and your customers.
      Good luck to you,
      Ed

      Comment


      • #4
        UK bottle conditioning

        In the UK it's pretty common to bottle condition. I think I'm right in saying that CAMRA consider this practise 'Real Ale' where as they don't force carbing (nonsense impo). People even on a fairly large scale will even use cane sugar with good results, invert is popular and I personally like corn sugar. General practice is to dissolve the sugar and ad it to a bright type tank that will be used for bottling, then transfer beer and bottle mixed solution. Some very small operations will bottle from cask/keg. You will obviously have to calculate correct quantities and make sure everything is done in a sanitary manner. Finished bottles will usually be given about three weeks in warm store at about 20 deg c.

        I take it you'll be hand bottling, what equipment will you be using? will/how will you sanitise bottles? These are questions I would personally give some attention to also. If you can it is well worth helping someone hand bottle on a similar or larger scale to yourself (if you haven't already). You'll learn a lot and save yourself a lot of head aches. I'm sure anyone hand bottling will be glad of the help.

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        • #5
          Bottle conditioning is very common her in the US also, but I think drew was referring to re-fermenting in regular kegs not bottles or firkins. I would also point out that carbing with a stone is different than force carbing in a homebrew setting in that carbolic acid is not stored in the beer. This may eliminate some of the issues you may have had with force carbing in the past. Just my .02 cents.
          cheers,
          Ed

          Comment


          • #6
            There's nothing inherently 'un-natural' about carbonating using a stone and this does have the benefit that you can generally achieve a more consistent product if this is done in a tank prior to packaging.

            Replicating the secondary fermentation process of bottle-conditioning, but on a larger scale, is straightforward; in the UK this is done in casks (ie. non-pressurised containers which have a porous wooden 'peg' to prevent excessive pressure build-up).

            It's important to ensure you have a similar amount of yeast in each container to ensure similar carbonation levels and you would have to do some experimentation with finings for clarity.

            Hope that helps & welcome to the forum!

            Comment


            • #7
              Thank you all for your very helpful comments and feedback! I will now attempt to digest the info! I was not aware of the definition of Real Ale but interestingly enough there was an article on it in the most recent edition of Zymurgy which was pretty interesting and informative.

              I'm definitely planning to do some more research on this spundig idea.

              Thanks again to all!

              Comment


              • #8
                On a related note, it is well worth the money to get the MBAA's Handbook of Basic Brewing Calculations, lots on natural carbonation and much more besides.

                Glad to see a fellow UVM person getting into pro brewing.

                Comment


                • #9
                  I agree with the person who said the spundig device. We use this method, although as previously stated, your fermenter must be able to hold the pressure. 1 bar or 15 psi minimum. All sorts of calculations. Gas dissolves more/less at different temps, density, ect. In this method you are conditioning in the tank. You are transferring from the fermenter (through filter?) to the bright already carbonated. It saves on gas costs. Some people think that's petty, some think that's smart. We make lagers so we really like the "conditioned" flavor. Yes a carbonation stone is "un" natural, but not unworthy. We still add some top pressure occasionally to reach desired carbonation levels, but the wait for co2 saturation is reduced considerably.

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                  • #10
                    time

                    I'd say probably in most small breweries there is a big time factor here as well to turn around tanks. The best way to do this quickly would probably be to "spund" either by sealing off the tank as the fermentation gets close to finishing (1.5-2P from TG) or by using a "spund aparati" (barby khuner, kiesselman, or others). Some of this depends on pressure rating of tanks, safety vent pressure rating, etc... Also transferring under pressure into a bright tank with a small stone in the bbt to fine tune if needed. this is probably the quickest method. Do you want to be a "purist" and not add any artificial co2...or perhaps you think natural co2 produces finer carbonation...yeah ok, maybe, i don't really know. good luck with that.
                    Last edited by CraftBeerIndia; 06-26-2013, 08:53 AM.
                    Alex Postelnek, Lead Brewer
                    Funky Buddha Brewery
                    Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33334
                    (561) 945 - 4584
                    alex@funkybuddhabrewery.com

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Carbonation

                      I'm sure it has been discussed in other areas on PB, but...

                      I'd really like to see people use a triangle test to determine IF "naturally" carbonating a beer actually produces a better beer than using a stone (same batch of beer as well). I believe that in a true blind triangle test this would be incredibly difficult if not impossible, but I could be wrong. I have much more important things to worry about in the brewery and 99.5% of the customers drinking you product wouldn't know the difference.

                      I also believe that if you told people that you are naturally capturing carbonation to make a better beer that they would agree and state that they are noticing a difference, even if you're not.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        It's not necessarily "better" it's just different.

                        We have 4 beer engines permanently in operation in our tasting room. Cask beer, that has undergone secondary fermentation and natural carbonation in the firkin, represents 45% of the beer pint sales over the counter. That's quite remarkable when you consider we have 10 tap beers too. So, those 4 beer engines represent 45% of the 14 beers in total we offer.

                        However, it doesn't represent 45% of total beer, as we don't do cask ale in growlers or corneys flls to go. Also, wholesale id primarily tap beer (although firkins are catching on and we're selling more of them at wholsesale - particularly when we provide training).

                        Sometimes, one or twoof the cask beers, we also do on tap, and when we do, the cask almost always out sells the tap beer by the pint - but we sell a lot of Growlers to go to - from the tap.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          For those of you using spunding devices:

                          For dry hopped beers is there a method for recirculating hops or rousing them? Seems like there is too much carbonation in the tanks to use any dry hopping methods other than just dumping hops in and letting them sit. We're thinking we may just use our spunding device on the non-dry hopped beers for this reason, thoughts?

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by InstitutionAles View Post
                            For those of you using spunding devices:

                            For dry hopped beers is there a method for recirculating hops or rousing them? Seems like there is too much carbonation in the tanks to use any dry hopping methods other than just dumping hops in and letting them sit. We're thinking we may just use our spunding device on the non-dry hopped beers for this reason, thoughts?
                            What I did for dry hopping when using spundig was to dump the hops in with the yeast just prior to knockout from the kettle. The bulk of the hop material would drop out with the yeast when the beer was crashed. Obviously you aren't going to be harvesting yeast from a tank dry hopped this way (assuming you are using pellets). I found that I had to increase my dry hop volume by about 10% to make up for what seemed to be lost through the blow off of fermentation. The upside was that I was able to turn the beers over just as fast as any others since I didn't have to let it rest at with the hops at fermentation temp for a few days prior to crashing. It's a trade off and as always, YMMV

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Originally posted by CraftBeerIndia View Post
                              ...Do you want to be a "purist" and not add any artificial co2...or perhaps you think natural co2 produces finer carbonation...yeah ok, maybe, i don't really know....
                              There is no difference in quality between 'natural' and 'forced' carbonation.

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