Oilive Oil

[Colin D'Orge]

I wanted to give this thread a bump because I find it fascinating. It's been quite a while, any solid conclusions?

[South County]

updates....?

Just wanted to bump this one to see if anyone has anything to add about there success and implementation. The more and more I research this, I'm thinking Olive oil additions have some skeleton in the closet or... its a case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!" ...otherwise I'm sold on switching over.

[MatthewS]

I was chatting the other day with some students from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. The Zymurgy program there has been going for about 4 years now. Apparently they are doing a study with Olive Oil. Not sure what they have concluded or if they are just in the beginning stages of the study. I will get in touch with them and report back when I get some more info.

[NorthernBrewer]

Aseptic olive oil

I have been following this thread for a number of months and now am interested enough to give Olive Oil a try. But I have a question. How do you know if your olive oil is aseptic (other than plating)? I guess one could boil it with a bit of water, but would that change the composition?

[sbradt]

Still going?

Natrat, it's been almost a year now since your original trials were posted. Question is - did you decide to stick with the olive oil or go back to O2?

[Natrat]

Sorry that I've been hanging back on this subject.

I am now with a different brewery, and in a different position. The brewery I was working with on the olive oil made it very clear to me (soon after I started posting my experiments) that they considered what I was doing to be their property, and did not want me to discuss it with anyone. Anywhere.

Needless to say, I didn't like that much.

I am no longer in possession of the hard data from my run of experiments, as they were very careful in making sure that it was all in house. But I can offer up a few bits of advice.

1. Don't use oil in place of o2 if you are in a fast paced production environment. The lag times I experienced often added 20-50 extra hours in fermentation, which can be a lot if you are on a tight rotation. If you can add two fermenters to your corral...well, that's different. Having said that, I had almost no lag if I mixed the oil with a bit of fresh wort, and then added that to the yeast about 6 hours before pitching.

2. I had better luck and better yields using grapeseed oil. Also, every grapeseed oil I tested was aseptic, as opposed to getting colonies in about 50% of the olive oils I tested.

3. Not using o2 seems to encourage yeast to make more esters. I did a few batches with neither 02 nor grapeseed oil, and the taste profiles were more like the the oil batches than the o2 batches. I admit I only tried this with two yeasts, but both were fairly neutral yeasts common in the industry, and both gave noticeably more esters in fermentation.

4. I have bottles of beer that are now more than a year old, made with no o2. They do not seem to taste stale. My measured Do2 in the brites made with oil-fed yeast were in the 5-8 ppb range. Yeah. My Do2 in the brites on oxygenated beers were 19-25 ppb.


The position I am in now will keep me from any more experimentation any time soon. I watch this thread with interest, and would love to see someone else duplicate my own explorations. I have a feeling that I may get a phone call from an irate someone after posting this, but I think it warrants more exploration. Hopefully someone reading this will get as intrigued as I did, and put some more development into the idea!
I love the thought that someone might be able to keep their Do2 in the finished beer to below 8 ppb. Then, if they were using a packaging method with low air pickups (say, a Cask canner) they might be able to stay under 15 ppb in their finished product! Or even less. Cool beans.

nat

[bbrewin]

Thanks for sharing this advice you gleened from YOUR efforts. Prost!

[Colin D'Orge]

Thanks for the input!