Ask The Brewmasters

Hello everyone,

I was wondering everyone's preferred method for dosing liquid (tetra, liquid dry hop products, finings, flavorings) into cold partially or fully carbonated beer.  We don't have dedicated dry hop ports on the top of our tanks.  We do have a top manway.  To this point, I just depressurize, open the manway, dump in the liquid, re-seal, re-pressurize the tank and burst in some CO2 from the racking port to mix.  We haven't noticed meaningful impacts on our DO levels, but it feels archaic.

For large volumes of stuff, we have a braukon hop gun, but an hour of prep do dose in a few liters of whatever seems like overkill.

I've read that people will put the liquid into a cleaned purged keg and push it into a tank, but this freaks me out too.  I don't know how to adequately clean a keg coupler or crappy plastic beer lines to where I'd feel comfortable using them to push stuff into a tank (maybe I'm being paranoid).

What are the preferred sanitary methods of doing this?

Thanks,

Anthony

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Anthony Baraff
Brewer/Owner
Brasserie Du Grand Paris
Saint Denis
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Anthony, do you have a racking am on your tanks. One way would be to set up a recirc loop from the racking arm to the tank bottom (or vice versa) and inject whatever you need to add into the loop ahead of the pump. I worked with ABE Equipment a while back to create an injection port for this, which has a small hose barb on the outside of a 1 1/2" TC elbow, passing through and bending into the flow in the center of the stream. You can attach a syringe or some small sanitary fitting to the hose barb, depending on the amount of material you need to push, and inject it slowly during recirculation. I did this expressly for injecting Tetra and other downstream hop products, but it should have application for any number of scenarios. For Tetra, you can also just inject it during transfer to filtration or bright tank, just make sure the injection point is at least 5m upstream of any filter, centrifuge, or an injection point for finings in order to give it time to go fully into solution before it gets to those points and potentially gets filtered out. Pictures are attached. I believe ABE is stocking these in their parts store

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Steve Bradt
President - District Great Plains
Hopsteiner
Craft Sales Representative
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This looks like a great option too.  Do you have a syringe that's adapted for this?  Where could I find one?

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Anthony Baraff
Brewer/Owner
Brasserie Du Grand Paris
Saint Denis
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Original Message:
Sent: 03-05-2024 12:59
From: Steve Bradt
Subject: Dosing liquid into a closed FV

Anthony, do you have a racking am on your tanks. One way would be to set up a recirc loop from the racking arm to the tank bottom (or vice versa) and inject whatever you need to add into the loop ahead of the pump. I worked with ABE Equipment a while back to create an injection port for this, which has a small hose barb on the outside of a 1 1/2" TC elbow, passing through and bending into the flow in the center of the stream. You can attach a syringe or some small sanitary fitting to the hose barb, depending on the amount of material you need to push, and inject it slowly during recirculation. I did this expressly for injecting Tetra and other downstream hop products, but it should have application for any number of scenarios. For Tetra, you can also just inject it during transfer to filtration or bright tank, just make sure the injection point is at least 5m upstream of any filter, centrifuge, or an injection point for finings in order to give it time to go fully into solution before it gets to those points and potentially gets filtered out. Pictures are attached. I believe ABE is stocking these in their parts store

------------------------------
Steve Bradt
President - District Great Plains
Hopsteiner
Craft Sales Representative
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 3/10/2024 2:31:00 PM
From: Anthony Baraff
Subject: RE: Dosing liquid into a closed FV

This looks like a great option too.  Do you have a syringe that's adapted for this?  Where could I find one?

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Anthony Baraff
Brewer/Owner
Brasserie Du Grand Paris
Saint Denis
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We have a 4" TC spool pipe that is about 9" long for this purpose.

It will hold a couple of liters for dosing we reduce down to 1.5" to hook up to our racking arm and the other end reduces down to 1.5" that we hook up to a quick connect and push in with CO2.  Back flush and push back in again.

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Ivan Dedek
Brewmaster/Food Scientist
Meier's Creek Brewing
Cazenovia NY
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We do a fair amount of dosing into brite tanks using 1/2bbl yeast brinks.  We'll sanitize with hot liquor, purge the entire hot liquor volume out with CO2, pressurize and then allow to cool to ambient.  The brink has valves up top which we attach a reducer to for pouring in liquids.  We can then push the brink into the tank with CO2 and pull liquid in-and-out to ensure we've fully emptied the contents. The benefit of the yeast brink is that it's all sanitary connections, easy to CIP, and easy to open up for inspection.  Any tubing is food-grade silicone or beer hose.

For viscous liquods, we often do this while actively recirculating the tank, just to ensure everything is homogenized.

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Jeremy Castellano
Director of Brewing Operations
Mission Brewing
San Diego, CA
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