Fellow Brewers,
Seems to me that those of us who practice aeration by gyration (shaking the snot out your carboys for 2 min.) fall into two categories: BPs and APs- before pitching or after pitching. Being a total Newbie, I have no idea why people would choose one over the other.
Which one are you and why? Or are you both?
I do it before, no reason other than that’s how I’ve always done it.
I aerate before pitching the yeast. Doing so is a hold over from my extract brewing days, when I wanted to know if my gravity was on target before I pitched the yeast. The aeration consisted of pouring the beer back and forth between a couple of buckets after adding the top-up water, which effectively mixed the wort and water to allow me to get an accurate hydrometer reading. In theory, I could then add more water if I wanted to, but I don’t remember if I ever did.
Before. I pour my wort from the kettle through a double mesh strainer and funnel. The strainer helps aerate it, then I also shake it a bit prior to pitching.
Do you find this help cut down on any trub/extra sediment that could get in the mix? I’ve been thinking of doing something similar.
BTW I aerate before and after pitching. Why? IDK I just do.
Do you find this help cut down on any trub/extra sediment that could get in the mix? I’ve been thinking of doing something similar.
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That’s why I started doing it but then I later started using a paint strainer bag to hold my hops during the boil, so now the answer is no.
The strainer doesn’t really catch much of anything but it does a great job of aerating the wort. Of course it’s one more thing to worry about cleaning and sanitizing. For that reason I’ve considered dropping it from the process.
I recently bought a wine degasser for the purposes of aerating and didn’t think that worked very well at all.
I’ve always aerated before pitching yeast, because that was the first instruction I ever saw about that. Then when I brewed on a yeast cake from a previous batch, I figured it might not matter so much. I still aerate first when pitching new yeast.
