3 ms·

Some points that are interesting to me, and warrant further investigation: 1) Milling of malts is no longer required. As a microbrewery operator, now I don't n

by theptip 10y ago

Some points that are interesting to me, and warrant further investigation: 1) Milling of malts is no longer required. As a microbrewery operator, now I don't need to come in the day before to run the mill for a planned brew. Massive win on scheduling and convenience. 2) "Concerning mashing and sparging, the new equipment allows to eliminate sparging altogether since the pulverization of cavitating malts ... prevents practically any starch to remain trapped into the grains". Again, from a microbrewery operator's perspective, another few hours of labour saved per brew, since I don't have to run a few sparges over my grain. 3) Since cavitation apparently sanitizes the wort, we don't need to do a boil. This saves another 1.5 hours on a brew, removes the need for a boil vessel, and some other equipment in my brewery (steam boiler to heat the boil vessel, a bunch of plumbing for said steam). 4) related to 3, the hops can be isomerized without boiling. I've had great success with low-boil techniques like the hop stand, so I'd assume that CHC beer would capture a lot more of the volatile aromatics from hops. This could lead to some great IPAs. I'd love to figure out what the MVP is for this rig, and whether it could be replicated at homebrew scale, as it seems to simplify the process massively.

bike4beer 10y ago
1) that's the primary implication of paper 2) their claim is a 3-5% improvement of extraction and no sparging required, thus a 30% saving's in power & water 3) given that malting is now done with cavitation ( ultra-sound ) its clear that this does not santize, as by defn sanitizing kill's biological life, including bacterial organisms. 4) Boiling hop's for 0-120 minutes is well understood and complex, I doubt you will find DogFish 90min-IPA, coming out of a 30 nano-second SONIC-SESSION. ... 'Ultra-Sound Assisted Extraction' is now being applied to all foods. To Coffee, and of course our beer. Sonic's can effect the germination of malting barley, and like in this article replace the milling/malting phase of the brewing process. The question to ask is why? Why apply sonic's to germinating grains? So they may germinate quicker. Why apply sonic's to malted grains, to break them up ( mill ) and to extract the sugar ( mash ) to a higher efficiency? Why would you want to do this? More efficient mashing? ( 3% ), and germination ( maybe save 6-12 hours ), because if you brewing 100,000 liters of piss-beer an hour this is real money to be made. Currently BUDweiser only buys the best malt, & hops. A ultra-sonic system that improves efficiency say 3-5% allow a cheaper or lower quality product to be bought and fed into the system. What does all this mean for the home-brewer? Nada What are the health effects of ultra-sound on germination? Nobody knows and nobody cares. Chemically what does ultra-sound do to our food when the starches are converted to sugar? Again nobody cares, google it, you'll not find a mention anywhere. What is the benefit of changing the modern ( 500 year old ) brewing process? Nada. Belgium Monks got it right a long time ago. Like we used to say in Unix back in the 1970's, "If it works, Don't Fix It". Slow-Food, and Slow-Beer people. That is what's best in life. LED lights were sold, over neon, over incandescent, now we find out LED is bad, when will they tell us the ultra-sonic processed foods are bad for our health? Probably only after the corpses are on laying on the streets.
- elktea 10y ago
  LED is bad?
  - mrob 10y ago
    LEDs often emit more blue spectrum light than older technologies, which makes them more effective at stopping melatonin production. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsically_photosensitive_retinal_ganglion_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsically_photosensitive_r... LEDs also switch much faster than older lights, which means people can pulse-width modulate them, causing annoying flicker for people who're sensitive to it. Admittedly both these problems are avoidable, but in practice they're seen as LED problems because they're so common with LEDs.
hyperbovine 10y ago
Plus just general water savings. Between sparging, boil off and cleanup I've felt pretty bad about brewing in drought-stricken California in the last few years. Also, I'm strictly an amateur brewer, but I thought that the boil had other useful features? (For example, eliminating chlorine.) Do you filter the water ahead of time?
- theptip 10y ago
  Where I am the water is very soft, and only lightly chlorinated, so I do not filter. (I do add minerals to improve the mash efficiency and yeast health though). If your water has lots of Chlorine (not Chloramine) then the boil will drive this off, but you might be better off starting with Reverse Osmosis water to get a clean slate, and then adding all the minerals you need. Another important reason for the boil is driving off DMS (which causes a cooked corn off-flavour). The paper covers both of these, I think: "Due to the strong liquid degassing properties as a result of hydrodynamic cavitation processes (Clark, Dewhurst, Payne, & Ellwood, 2001; Gogate & Pandit, 2011; Iben, Wolf, Freudigmann, Fröhlich, & Heller, 2015; Senthil Kumar, Siva Kumar, & Pandit, 2000), undesired volatile aromatic compounds are safely expelled after few minutes of cavitation" Sounds like this would apply to the volatile chlorine as well, but I'm not certain about that. Also sounds like this should be more rigorously tested, as I don't see anything by way of data to back up this claim; perhaps the cited papers explain more.

by theptip 10y ago

bike4beer 10y ago

1) that's the primary implication of paper 2) their claim is a 3-5% improvement of extraction and no sparging required, thus a 30% saving's in power & water 3) given that malting is now done with cavitation ( ultra-sound ) its clear that this does not santize, as by defn sanitizing kill's biological life, including bacterial organisms. 4) Boiling hop's for 0-120 minutes is well understood and complex, I doubt you will find DogFish 90min-IPA, coming out of a 30 nano-second SONIC-SESSION. ... 'Ultra-Sound Assisted Extraction' is now being applied to all foods. To Coffee, and of course our beer. Sonic's can effect the germination of malting barley, and like in this article replace the milling/malting phase of the brewing process. The question to ask is why? Why apply sonic's to germinating grains? So they may germinate quicker. Why apply sonic's to malted grains, to break them up ( mill ) and to extract the sugar ( mash ) to a higher efficiency? Why would you want to do this? More efficient mashing? ( 3% ), and germination ( maybe save 6-12 hours ), because if you brewing 100,000 liters of piss-beer an hour this is real money to be made. Currently BUDweiser only buys the best malt, & hops. A ultra-sonic system that improves efficiency say 3-5% allow a cheaper or lower quality product to be bought and fed into the system. What does all this mean for the home-brewer? Nada What are the health effects of ultra-sound on germination? Nobody knows and nobody cares. Chemically what does ultra-sound do to our food when the starches are converted to sugar? Again nobody cares, google it, you'll not find a mention anywhere. What is the benefit of changing the modern ( 500 year old ) brewing process? Nada. Belgium Monks got it right a long time ago. Like we used to say in Unix back in the 1970's, "If it works, Don't Fix It". Slow-Food, and Slow-Beer people. That is what's best in life. LED lights were sold, over neon, over incandescent, now we find out LED is bad, when will they tell us the ultra-sonic processed foods are bad for our health? Probably only after the corpses are on laying on the streets.

elktea 10y ago
LED is bad?
- mrob 10y ago
  LEDs often emit more blue spectrum light than older technologies, which makes them more effective at stopping melatonin production. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsically_photosensitive_retinal_ganglion_cells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsically_photosensitive_r... LEDs also switch much faster than older lights, which means people can pulse-width modulate them, causing annoying flicker for people who're sensitive to it. Admittedly both these problems are avoidable, but in practice they're seen as LED problems because they're so common with LEDs.

hyperbovine 10y ago

Plus just general water savings. Between sparging, boil off and cleanup I've felt pretty bad about brewing in drought-stricken California in the last few years. Also, I'm strictly an amateur brewer, but I thought that the boil had other useful features? (For example, eliminating chlorine.) Do you filter the water ahead of time?

theptip 10y ago
Where I am the water is very soft, and only lightly chlorinated, so I do not filter. (I do add minerals to improve the mash efficiency and yeast health though). If your water has lots of Chlorine (not Chloramine) then the boil will drive this off, but you might be better off starting with Reverse Osmosis water to get a clean slate, and then adding all the minerals you need. Another important reason for the boil is driving off DMS (which causes a cooked corn off-flavour). The paper covers both of these, I think: "Due to the strong liquid degassing properties as a result of hydrodynamic cavitation processes (Clark, Dewhurst, Payne, & Ellwood, 2001; Gogate & Pandit, 2011; Iben, Wolf, Freudigmann, Fröhlich, & Heller, 2015; Senthil Kumar, Siva Kumar, & Pandit, 2000), undesired volatile aromatic compounds are safely expelled after few minutes of cavitation" Sounds like this would apply to the volatile chlorine as well, but I'm not certain about that. Also sounds like this should be more rigorously tested, as I don't see anything by way of data to back up this claim; perhaps the cited papers explain more.