Aeration Wand

[Stinkfist]

@Stinkfist - Man, I only got like 5 (10 gal) batches out of the Home Depot canister aerating for 45 seconds per carboy. My experience plus what Jamil said on one of the recent Brew Strong shows convinced me to go get a bigger tank.

@maxwell - I pasturize it in the HLT while I'm heating the sparge water. After that I drop it in the bucket of sanitizer. Every other batch I will boil it.

~widget

do you run it wide open for 45 seconds? lol def should get more than 5 batches...you want it to come out of the stone but not really break the surface of the wort when you are adding it otherwise you are wasting oxygen at it will just come straight out of solution..I easily get 40 5 gallon batches out of the 2.12 or whatever ounce tank from home depot..

[mtyquinn]

I have to get one of these. I'm tired of doing the shake, and wondering if I'm shaking enough.

[Buttwidget]

If I remember correctly, from the Brew Strong episodes, you aren't really adding a whole lot of O2 to solution, you are essentially filling the head space.

~widget

[jimmiec]

That's what I remember Buttwidget and with pure O2 unlike the shaking method. I have the Williams setup and love it especially the price, a cheap way to add oxygenating to the process. I may be buy 2 bottles a year (if that) with brewing my allowed 200 gallons a years.

[Stinkfist]

If all you want to do is fill the headspace why would you even use an aeration stone, since the point of those is to dissolve it into solution. Doesn't make sense to me why you would only want to fill the headspace?

[spiderwrangler]

The current thought (according to JZ) is that the majority of the O2 uptake happens at the surface rather than during the rise of hte little bubbles up from the bottom. However, having a fine aeration stone creates a turnover in the wort, effectively creating a convection current within the fermentor. Finer bubbles will generate this turnover better than one huge bubble glugging up from the bottom.

[maxwell]

I do remember something being said about oxygen exchange with the headspace, but commercial breweries oxygenate inline while transferring wort to the fermenter, so the dissolution of oxygen from the micro-bubbles must be important at least in that setting.

[anday6]

With inline you are dealing with a much higher ratio of O2 to wort than you are in a full fermentation volume. Plus inline has the added exchange action from the flow of the wort. It's all a combination of surface areas, motion and time.