Flanders Red

[aleguy]

You want it? You can't have it! No, no, you can't get it 'round here! I'm thinking about making some up. (Sometime in the far distant future.)
To do it right, I'm going to need a 55-gallon oak barrel, (preferably used) and a flash-pasteurizing unit. So. Does anyone know where to find such a barrel, and how much such a thing might cost? Does anyone have any ideas about building a flash pasteurizer from scratch? C'mon, guys we have engineers and scientists, garage tinkerers and welders.
To be honest, I haven't really started looking into any of this yet, the people on the BN forum pissed me off, so I thought I would try posting this here. Frankly I'm not really sure where to start looking. Seems we had a barrel discussion a while back. Pasteurization? I was always against it, but for this style, it's critical. (There's no way I'm going to be able to drink all of it fast enough.)

[yeastmeister]

Ok, explain a little. Why pasturization? Why not standard chemical methods?

[aleguy]

If you're talking about sulfite, I don't know. I think the Brett is harder to kill than that, but I'm not sure. I do know wine producers can't seem to get rid of Brett, no matter what they try, once they get it.
Besides how cool would it be to build a flash pasteurizer for home brew? I was planning to rely on a significant amount of help from other club members in figuring out how to do it. (Cheaply!)

[redtail28]

I've seen use barrels on the net for about 200, shipping is another
question. I don't know any thing about sour beers but you
want to kill all the bug just to add them back

[aleguy]

No. I want to kill the bugs before I blend with new beer and bottle. Otherwise, either the bottles explode, or you end up with the blended beer becoming as dry as the original aged beer.
The wild bugs can, and will, eat all the starches and sugars that normal brewers' yeast can't. So adding new beer to sweeten it up a little would be pointless without killing the wild bugs.

[Mob_Barley]

Why not just control the amount of fermentables that the brett has access to, by first fermenting with your yeast of choice until most of the fermentables are gone, then add the bacteria. With experimentation, you should be able to determine how much sourness you will get with a particular attenuation level of the beer. After the brett have consumed the fermentables, they will fall out and you can then rack and carbonate or rack and prime, or even filter the beer first if you want.

[aleguy]

Filtering is out! As far as Brett falling out, it only behaves like Sacharomyces when it is alone. in the presence of other organisms, mostly Pediococcus, it behaves quite differently. Again, after blending, if there are any wild bugs left, you stand a good chance of either exploding bottles or having the beer dry out too much.
I was thinking maybe I could "flash" pasteurize with two plate chillers in series. One using boiling water to heat the beer up to pasteurization temperatures and one to chill it back down with ice water. I still need to look up some details, but I think it should work.

[GuitarLord5000]

Old topic, I know, but I've been giving this subject a lot of thought lately. I know it's not a 'flash' unit, but I think this should work well enough. Also, it would pasteurize your beer pre-blend, as opposed to after bottling.
Take your recently finished, uncarbonated Flanders and keg it in a homebrew keg. Purge the O2 headspace, but don't add any CO2 pressure. Use a temp controlled RIMS or HERMS unit to get a keggle to a water temp of 161 degrees. Immerse the homebrew kegged Flanders in the keggle water for long enough to bring the Flanders temp up to 161 degrees (an hour?).
The temp of 161 comes from Milk Pasteurizing literature. I don't know how well it would work for beer, though.
Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Dave

[thebuddrik]

That sounds very doable Dave. Does anyone else know if that is the right temp.?

[yeastmeister]

Urk....too much info to repeat here. Do a search for beer pasturization. 1 hour is excessive. I'm thinking you need to be able to do flash, or not at all.

[GuitarLord5000]

I'm thinking you need to be able to do flash, or not at all.

Why would this be the case? I believe that most beer that has been pasteurized is not flashed, but tunnel pasteurized. I know that Pilsner Urquell is, as are several of the Anheuser Busch beers. From what I've been able to read, tunnel pasteurization is anything but instantaneous, with 10-15 minutes at 140 degrees being typical.
Essentially, this technique is sort of a combination of vat pasteurizing, and tunnel pasteurizing.
I would be interested in knowing how long it would take to get a 5 gallon keg of beer up to 145 degrees using this technique. If it could be done in say, 15 minutes, then rapidly cooled with an ice bath, I think this could have some merit for sour beer pasteurizing. Unless I'm missing some vital information. My Google-Fu is only so strong.

Cheers,
Dave

[yeastmeister]

From what I read, kegs are seldom pasteurized, but bottles are. From what I have read from various sources, bottles are passed through sprays of 140F-145F water for anywhere from 3 minutes to 10 minutes. I really don't know what the internal temp of the bottles gets to.

The closest thing I can find to a temperature chart comes from the USDA for chicken.
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FSISNotices/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf

Using that chart, and what I read in the literature for beer is sort of seems consistent.

What is little understood about pasteurization is that it is a function of temperature and time, not just temperature. You can pasteurize something at 130F for 121 minutes, or 145F for 4 minutes, or 156 for 19 seconds.

Heating beer accelerates the reactions that cause beer to stale. The general thing is, if it takes you 30 minutes to get up to 145, then I'd worry about whats happening during that time to the flavors, its long since been pasteurized by that time due to the time spent at the lower temps, and your heating it for no reason.

But your not pasturizing for the same reason the big boys are. They are pasturizing for shelf life. Your trying to kill the bugs off so that they don't ferment the new beer. I'm not sure thats possible without really screwing with the flavor. If you don't kill it all, 100%, then your gonna get bottle bombs.

Just blend it and always keep it cold. If you store if below 35F, it won't ferment any further. Warm it up, and watch out.