Controlling Oxygen in Beer with Colin Kaminski – BeerSmith Podcast #293

by Brad Smith on December 1, 2023 · 1 comment

This week I welcome back Colin Kaminski to discuss oxygen in finished beer, hot side aeration and how to minimize oxygen pickup.

Subscribe on iTunes to Audio version or Video version or Spotify or Google Play

Download the MP3 File– Right Click and Save As to download this mp3 file.

Topics in This Week’s Episode (53:21)

  • This week I welcome Colin Kaminski. Colin is the co-author of the Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers (Amazon affiliate link) as well as a professional brewer with Downtown Joe’s in Napa, California. Colin designs professional brewing equipment at MoreBeer. He has been brewing since 1998.
  • We start with a discussion of Colin’s activities since he last appeared on the show.
  • Colin explains the three major areas where oxygen comes into play: hot side aeration, aeration before fermentation and oxygen contamination in a finished beer.
  • He share his experience using a high end Anton-Paar C box to measure oxygen in finished cans of beer from a canning line.
  • We talk about Total Packaged Oxygen (TPO) and how it can change over time. Colin explains how some oxygen can be captured by hops and other compounds, but eventually gets released back into the beer.
  • He shares his thoughts on reducing oxygen pickup during transfers, bottling, kegging and canning.
  • We talk about dry hopping and how it can introduce additional oxygen into a finished beer.
  • Colin discusses hot side aeration and how it can affect the malt flavor and brightness in a beer
  • He shares how you can detect oxygen problems, and his closing thoughts.

Sponsors


iTunes Announcements: I launched a new video channel for the BeerSmith podcast on iTunes, so subscribe now! At the moment it will only feature the new widescreen episodes (#75 and up). Older episodes are available on my revamped Youtube channel. Also all of my audio episodes are on iTunes now – so grab the older episodes if you missed any.

Thoughts on the Podcast?

Leave me a comment below or visit our discussion forum to leave a comment in the podcast section there.

Subscribe to the Podcast on iTunes or BeerSmith Radio

You can listen to all of my podcast episodes streaming live around the clock on our BeerSmith Radio online radio station! You can also subscribe to the audio or video using the iTunes links below, or the feed address

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the blog and my newsletter (or use the links in the sidebar) – to get free weekly articles on home brewing.

Related Beer Brewing Articles from BeerSmith:

Enjoy this Article? You'll Love Our BeerSmith Software!
  Don't make another bad batch of beer! Give BeerSmith a try - you'll brew your best beer ever.
Download a free 21 day trial of BeerSmith now

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Finn Berger December 2, 2023 at 4:10 pm

Great interview. But Kaminski said something that is wrong, and which might mislead people: He said that yeast concentrated on storing sterols at the end of fermentation. That’s wrong; he must have meant glycogen. Or i really hope he meant glycogen.

That’s rather important. As Palmer says in How to Brew, you need to give the yeats some time with no oxygen towards the end of a starter when you spin it on a stirplate, in order to let it build up it’s glycogen and trehalose stores. And without those it won’t be able to work efficiently at synthezing sterols with the oxygen we feed it at the start of a new batch.

I think that’s something that’s it’s very critical to understand, and I think it was crucial in Chris White’s message to homebrewers in your podcast about pitching yeast, when he was talking about reusing yeast. (One of you best podcasts!)

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: