Fermentation Contemplation - Pasteurization, Racking, and Storage of Homebrew

today's fermentation contemplation pasteurization shelf life and racking too soon [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so this is like a new thing that we're trying out we used to do the brew talks every once in a while and they went over pretty well a lot of people liked them but it started turning into well we had to come up with a topic and we decided you know what why not just go with what's already happening because we kept thinking oh we did a video on that or we did a video on that and then we realized we have 400 plus videos that we made can't expect everybody to know what's in them heck i don't even know what's in all of them anymore so rather than just say oh go do this or go do that we just said let's go through the last few weeks or months or whatever of comments and see what topics keep coming up and the first one that came up was pasteurization now we've done pasteurization various different ways in the past and so we have videos on pasteurizing using boiling water that we put into a big thermostyle tub we did a more recent version of pasteurization where we use the sous-vide method and then we did another one where we actually kept them all in our large pressure cooker yep yep yeah the thing is there's a lot of ways to pasteurize okay and we left all of our videos up because they all show how to do it the only thing that's really changed is the uh target temperature we look for 140 degrees fahrenheit which is 60 degrees celsius as an internal temperature for the fluid itself once you've reached that 10 minutes you're pasteurized now one important thing we need to discuss also is derika what are you drinking today i am drinking our strawberry cider it is a little cloudy but it's got that distinctive pinkish peach-ish hue that we've noticed our strawberry brews have and it's really quite lovely and i'm drinking our basic cider just the uh still and dry one and i got to tell you this was bottled um the bottles right here december 6th of 2021 this is now april 12th of 2022 so we're like four months later it's so much smoother and so much nicer than it was back then and it was a decent cider back then this is completely dry and um wow it's actually really nice i kind of like it awesome so back to package pasteurization and the basics of pasteurization is regardless of how you get there you want to reach that criteria that brian already discussed and that's 140 degrees fahrenheit internal temperature in what you're pasteurizing and you want that to sustain for roughly 10 minutes and that way that level of heat is going to kill the yeast so they can't continue multiplying and being fruitful right so we have gotten there through various methods and you can choose your method as well to get there and once you've gotten there you're pasteurized now there's some caveats to that the biggest caveat i think is safety but i was going to go a little bit more in depth as to what the pasteurization is for because a lot of us are familiar with pasteurization of say milk and various food products and that's to kill off a lot of different things in our case we are after the yeast period enemy number one in this case they're not really the enemy because they did their job we just want to kill them off nicely but anyway let them rest in peace they start to die at 120 degrees fahrenheit i don't know what that is celsius it'll be down here so i went with 140 because that is 20 degrees higher you're pretty much guaranteed to kill them off i know some people have done 130 and we used to recommend 160 but i have found that 130 wasn't reliable and 160 sometimes changed flavors and made things a little bit more dangerous for exploding bottles or cracking bottles actually so 140 seems to be that sweet spot of it kills the yeast reliably but it doesn't alter the flavors and it doesn't add to a safety component or detract from a safety component yeah however you want to look at that so yeah get it to 140 degrees for 10 minutes and that's it something else that comes up all the time is we've shown in an earlier video where we did that we said don't uncover them you want to keep them covered the alcohol will evaporate that's because we were under the impression that the alcohol would evaporate but an actual honest-to-goodness scientist corrected us on that and then with further explanation we're like oh that makes sense and it's basically due to the diameter of your aperture your opening and the volume of liquid and how that would escape through the different processes and basically it's very minimal yeah essentially two when you mix alcohol ethanol methanol all those things with water their boiling point changes okay we're not going to get into the whole distillation process but in distilling they're actually getting it to a much higher temperature than what we think it's just the heads and all that boils off first because it does still have a lower temperature but it's not actually the really low number of methanol okay just that's important even in distillation which occurs for water and alcohol just whatever but we're not talking about that no it's actually a perfectly fine thing to talk about because that pertains to this you preface that but you weren't going to get into that then you got it yeah but anyway it's a similar concept so we're just doing the opposite way we don't want it to evaporate therefore we're not getting to a temperature that can allow it to evaporate in the beginning when i first came up with 140 degree temperature it was to keep it below the 163 or 164 degrees that ethanol evaporates at and then i realized no it's actually more so to keep it from changing flavors so it works on multiple levels but just suffice to say that open bottles at 140 degrees is not going to lose any measurable or even noticeable amount of alcohol and to put it in an even further perspective when you're cooking with wine let's say you literally would have to pour in the wine into an open vessel meaning like a wide open sauce pan and cook it for two to three hours before ninety percent of the alcohol is gone so think about it you have this wide pot cooking for hours versus very narrow neck 10 minutes lower temperature too when you're cooking that you're boiling it basically so you're you're not losing any alcohol it's just not even something to be worried about we used to think you did but hey you know what as time changes you learn stuff and that's why we're sharing it with you so another safety thing you want to consider when pasteurizing is i've had many people ask can i just do this on my stovetop the simple answer is yes but the more complicated is yes sort of you can bring your water up to temperature on your stovetop and then transfer that very carefully because it's really hot to a vessel with your beverages already prepared because basically you don't want to have your bottles on a boiling surface because that may lead to safety issues such as explosions cracking massive stereo that's right if you want to do it on the stovetop the way is to get the water up to temperature probably go a little bit higher because it's going to get reduced as you put your bottles in put something in the bottom of that pot or vessel that you're using take it off the heat then put your bottles in it's a little bit more tricky to get a reliable number that's why we really like the sous-vide method with the immersion heater brings up the temperature keeps it there nice and simple if you want to monitor it all the time you can add boiling water and all that to keep the temperature you can my suggestion get a cheap sous-vide and just do it that way it's so much easier another thing you want to keep in mind when bringing the water up to temperature and either adding your bottles to that or adding that to your vessel with your bottles in is that's like a really quick shock to the glass and the temperature should change and that alone could cause breakage so another reason why we like the sous-vide method because it slowly brings that temperature up exactly so you don't have that shock to the vessels exactly yeah you never want to apply heat while your bottles are in the vessel on a stove top because the burner is creating much more heat than what you need so there's a big temperature differential the other problem that we see is people started asking so do i have to pasteurize everything no absolutely not we don't pasteurize much at all to be honest you only pasteurize when you have to pasteurize so when do you have to pasteurize if you have not reached the alcohol tolerance of your yeast like say you're using a 15 yeast and you made a 10 brew and then you decide you want to back sweeten it if you do not pasteurize that you're not back sweetening anymore you're step feeding it it's going to re-ferment most likely and if you bottle it that way you're making a bomb just that simple that's one aspect we actually go over this in the cider four ways video explained every bit but i'll just give you a quick synopsis here the other is if you want a sweet carbonated beverage okay so you're seeing sweetness has a lot to do with this if you made a dry beverage and you want to carbonate you just add priming sugar it'll ferment out just that amount and you're done it comes out dry comes out carbonated no problem the second you want that to stay sweet that's when it changes so tigger just woke up to make it sweet and carbonated you basically have to have a beverage that already has sugars in it but you also can't be past the alcohol tolerance or else it won't carbonate so it's a similar situation you want a controlled amount of carbonation but then you don't want to use up all the sugars and it's a much more tricky situation okay i don't recommend it for your first time out just don't we did go over this in our ginger beer video the all-in-one we even clarified quite a few of the things it is a little tricky it's also in the cider for cider finishing four ways so we'll have links to those so you can see that there might be cards here too i don't i don't know that is the only time that we pasteurize or if we feel like there's a chance this might be fermenting again for whatever reason pasteurize it stops it right there there are other ways to stabilize bruise we just don't choose to do it that way i'm not ever gonna say never do it that way or it's bad we just choose not to we like to keep things a little simple if you choose a different method of stabilizing your brew please follow the directions carefully absolutely um the next thing we want to talk about is racking too early this comes up all the time somebody says oh i made a brew and i racked it and it's at 1.080 it came down 30 points first thing that we want to say is why did you rack it already a lot of people want to rack things because they see the leaves forming and they want to get it off that or there's no reason that lease also contains living yeast it's also food for your yeast it's nutrients for your yeast it is the whole colony as itself you don't want to remove a part of that if you rack it too soon you could cause stress to your yeast which could cause all flavors could cause it to stall could cause many things to happen it's just it's not a good idea how do you know if it's complete you take a reading you wait a week and then you take another reading you compare those two readings if they're exactly the same it's probably done or stalled we actually did a video on this too to know when it's done or stalled see everything has caveats but basically use a little bit of common sense if it was meant to go dry and it went dry and it stayed dry for a week it's done if it was meant to go dry and it's still super high gravity even if it stayed the same it's stalled yeah really simple if it if you don't know you might want to plan out your brew a little bit better and understand how hydrometers work that's a critical thing to understand in the science and art of brewing now somebody's been telling me oh i don't use a hydrometer i'm perfectly fine and you know what you totally can and it's okay but when people start asking us questions it's easier if we have this information to be able to help without that information we are flying blind and we like to help we want to help but if somebody just says hey my brew is really sweet what happened i don't know what did you do you know without knowing what you did without a reading without a gauge without any idea of what to go by we can't help so that's the whole purpose behind this it's not to pick on anyone for what they do because hey you know what every single day we hear from somebody that's never brewed before that wants to start brewing and i think that is awesome and i mean literally every day somebody is just getting into this and goes in wide-eyed has no idea what's going on wants to reinvent the wheel wants to do things better wants to make awesome stuff and i think that's fantastic you know what we were there too hell yeah everybody was there every single person that's watching this video has been in that situation at some point so i don't ever want to step on somebody for doing that but i'd like them to understand a little bit more of what's going on and maybe take a step back from the reinvention of the wheel and you know walk before you run even maybe even crawl before you walk you know it's just it's brewing is not that complicated but there's a few simple things to follow that if you follow those you'll be just fine um okay we do have a video on when to rack and how to do all that it's called are you racking too soon um but also some other thing we have notes here because there's just no way i would stay on track if i didn't have notes for this if you are trying to keep some sweetness in a brew though rather than racking too soon to try to keep that sweetness or coal crashing which it doesn't stop fermentation it's a temporary thing what you actually want to do is either go dry back sweeten and pasteurize which brings us back to point one or try to surpass the alcohol tolerance of your yeast while a useful tactic it's not as reliable or repeatable it is totally doable we've done it we did it for years that way and we found that in teaching people it's much easier to go dry back sweeten to what you exactly want it to be pasteurized done if you've watched many of our videos you will notice in the earlier videos we tried to do the math first and try to figure out where our sweetness is and then adjust based on that but there's so many times because what you can't read that those yeasts would just keep on going and screw the math all up so now we found it's so much easier just to firm it to dry and then back sweeten it to taste because not only does that work and i'm sorry i didn't mean not only does that work better we actually can keep the abv a little bit lower by keeping the original gravity slightly down because think about it if you're trying to overpower say ec1118 you need a very high gravity that's hard to do using simple brewing methods like we do it's really hard to do so your likelihood of a stall is very high as evidenced by a couple of brews that we did along the way hey you know what you live and learn right so by keeping it to a lower you know keep in that 10 to 15 abv range your gravities start out a little bit lower cleaner fermentations quicker fermentations comes out tasting better and you have more control and more repeatability that was the key for us is we want to be able to say hey this recipe if you do it you should be able to make it much like what we did we know environmental changes different scenarios but for the most part it should be more or less like what we made going with the overshooting method man we heard from people with vastly different results than what we had so this just made things a little bit simpler so the basic point is don't rack too early let it finish first even if you have fruit even if you have all kinds of stuff keep that fruit just kind of moist don't worry about it it'll be fine now if you see mold obviously that's bad very bad but if you keep an airlock on it give it a swirl every now and then to keep that fruit cap wet you should be just fine storage and shelf life this one comes up all the time um and i don't really know where it comes from but people are under the impression that homebrew has to be refrigerated or it goes bad i think this harkens back to ye olden times before people understood what was actually happening and they didn't let it finish before they bottled and or they back sweetened and didn't pasteurize or stabilize in some way so bottle bombs well people figured out that hey if you keep it cold it lessens the chances notice i said lessons it doesn't eliminate it ask paul one of our mods he will tell you and possibly show you a video of someone's refrigerator after they put yeah they put uh brew in there that wasn't completely finished thinking hey i'll just cold crash and it'll be fine yeah well they blew up even in the fridge because it doesn't stop fermentation it slows it down greatly nature will find a way that's the main takeaway from that nature will find a way so what are we storing we actually did a video on this we stored all kinds of bottles everything from flip tops to screw tops to quirks they can't see that that's way over there they can only see like to here yeah flip top screw tops the occasional cork we've even bottle capped and you know what we have not found any that are inherently superior or inferior to others granted if you're reusing caps that have been used a few times you might want to check for a seal if it doesn't seal it's not going to work once you have a good seal though years undisturbed years keep jostling them around move them around put them outside bring them inside you know now you're asking for trouble the bigger problem comes when you try to go long long term because now you're at the mercy of your environment the temperature the brew itself um different brews will age differently and last differently and some are just more volatile than others that's just the way it is as well as the actual mechanics of your glass for your bottle the cap that you use the covering all of those things come into play when you start going long long term but think about it how many wines do you have sit in your house for more than three or four years right that you bought well some people might actually have wine cellar and though they will keep them for that special speaking of generalities how many do you really have okay if you want to try to keep one for that special occasion by all means go for it we have a bottle of pineapple meat that's been opened sampled four plus years going no oxidation no vinegarization it's got no signs of spoilage of any kind and it's just a simple screw-on cap from a leftover wild turkey bottle i mean it just doesn't get much simpler than that and it's lasting so the idea is no you don't have to refrigerate we literally bottle them put them on a shelf put them in a box and forget about them until we consume them so the biggest thing you really want to consider when storing something long-term is you want to keep it out of direct sunlight that is the thing that can cause more issues than anything else really as long as you have a clean fermentation in a well-sealed bottle it should be fine as long as it's kept out of direct sunlight right so hopefully that helped a little bit and answered some of your questions we do have links to all the videos that we talked about here all these topics so that way it's much easier for you to find and as always guys thank you so much for watching have a great day bye [Music] today's fermentation contemplation i can't not [Laughter] it's so hard to not laugh when once you start laughing today's

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 16,448

Keywords: fermentation contemplation pasteurization racking and storage, fermentation contemplatcion, fermentation brewing, fermentation pasteurizing, fermentation pasteurization, fermentation racking, fermentation storage, fermentation bottling, when to rack homebrew, when to bottle homebrew, when to pasteurize homebrew, fermentation, pasteurization, racking, shelf life of homebrew, shelf life of mead, shelf life of homemade wine

Id: mSa_q_WOdiU

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022