Help with Defoamer 105 Calculations

[brandonnys]

Yesterday's Pliny clone ended up getting dumped down the drain because I poured an entire bottle of Defoamer 105 into it on accident. Those little "dropper" cap things are terribad. (No comments on dumping the beer please. It's gone. Let it go.)

Anywho, now what I'm trying to do is figure out how to properly meter/dose using Defoamer 105 as part of my process. I know that the federal limit for silicone in food products is 200ppm per the FDA. I also know that Defoamer is a 10% silicone mixture per their SDS sheet.

At this point I'd like to figure out a way to reasonably estimate, in milliliters, how much Defoamer 105 can go into a gallon of wort before it is beyond the threshhold.

Is there a way to use the weight of a given volume to determine the molarity of the silicone, knowing its concentration in the solution and assuming that the rest is water? (A big and somewhat silly assumption, I know)

I have an email in to Five Star, awaiting a reply. If they don't come back with something, I'm hoping that you guys/gals can help me figure this out.

Please Note: There seems to be some debate on the forum about whether this product settles out with the trub, whether it is metabolized by the yeast and settles out, or whether it will cause full-on renal shutdown if you dose too much. I'm not really interested in getting involved in that debate, just for how to calculate additions to remain below the FDA threshhold. However, I understand that if silicone is metabolized or settles out, it could affect the PPM positively by way of transfer from primary to secondary. If there's non-anecdotal evidence surrounding this, please bring it to the table.


SIDE QUEST: Is silicone large enough to be caught in a 5micron filter? How about a 1micron?

 

[brandonnys]

I have an email in to Five Star and they have a chemist that is supposed to get a hold of me. I'll report back my findings once I have them.

 

[sandyeggoxj]

Thanks for researching this. I am very interested!

 

[Dustbowl]

So I found the info on the Defoamer 105 label remarkably unhelpful as well. The limit for silicone in food products is 10 ppm according to 21 CFR 173.340. Since we know the silicone content, we can calculate the maximum volume to utilize of the defoaming agent,

(10 nL/L, this is 10 ppm) x (19L, this is 5 gallons of wort into the fermenter) = 190 nL silicone allowed per 5 gallons of finished wort.

Since the Defoamer 105 is 10% silicone,

(190 nL silicone) / (10% silicone/defoamer 105) / (1000 nL/mL) = 1.9 mL Defoamer 105 allowed per 5 gallons of finished wort.

The drops produced from the dropper are approximately 0.1 mL each (this is an estimate). Thus we could utilize up to 19 drops of Defoamer 105 per 5 gallons of finished wort. This is certainly way more than you would ever need; 5 drops is about all I ever used in a 6 gallon batch of finished beer.

Hope this helps!

 

[brandonnys]

There isn't some special formal for this that factors in the molarity of silicone? I feel pretty dumb here because everything you wrote makes complete sense, but for some reason I thought molarity would have something to do with it.

I re-read 21 CFR 173.340 and couldn't find the 10ppm number that you mentioned. I saw 10ppm under the heading "Dimethylpolysiloxane". Are we assuming that this is the substance in Defoamer 105? I'm honestly curious. Five star's SDS sheet hides the actual substance, likely because it's proprietary.

 

[eric19312]

So I found the info on the Defoamer 105 label remarkably unhelpful as well. The limit for silicone in food products is 10 ppm according to 21 CFR 173.340. Since we know the silicone content, we can calculate the maximum volume to utilize of the defoaming agent,

(10 nL/L, this is 10 ppm) x (19L, this is 5 gallons of wort into the fermenter) = 190 nL silicone allowed per 5 gallons of finished wort.

Since the Defoamer 105 is 10% silicone,

(190 nL silicone) / (10% silicone/defoamer 105) / (1000 nL/mL) = 1.9 mL Defoamer 105 allowed per 5 gallons of finished wort.

The drops produced from the dropper are approximately 0.1 mL each (this is an estimate). Thus we could utilize up to 19 drops of Defoamer 105 per 5 gallons of finished wort. This is certainly way more than you would ever need; 5 drops is about all I ever used in a 6 gallon batch of finished beer.

Hope this helps!

I believe this is the amount of the product that it would be ok to add into the keg of finished beer if you could manage to keep it in solution and not stick to the yeast at the bottom of the keg, any fining agents, the walls of the keg etc. Defoamer added earlier in the process is supposed to drop out during the process. I believe it does stick to trub and yeast. BSG claims it is all gone at end of the process, some sticks to yeast, some to the fermentation vessel, etc. I believe this is maybe mostly true (maybe there is detectable level that makes it through but lets agree it is something less than the initial dosing. I'm comfortable with this assumption based on seeing zero impact on head formation and retention in beers brewed with Fermacp S in the boil or fermentor.

Back to the FDA 10 ppm. This is a limit they they are sure causes no harm based on seeing quantities 1000x more than this quantity causing no harm.

 

[Dustbowl]

There isn't some special formal for this that factors in the molarity of silicone? I feel pretty dumb here because everything you wrote makes complete sense, but for some reason I thought molarity would have something to do with it.

I re-read 21 CFR 173.340 and couldn't find the 10ppm number that you mentioned. I saw 10ppm under the heading "Dimethylpolysiloxane". Are we assuming that this is the substance in Defoamer 105? I'm honestly curious. Five star's SDS sheet hides the actual substance, likely because it's proprietary.

Silicone used in anti-foaming food applications like this is dimethylpolysiloxane; other forms of silicone exist (mostly with different functional groups, but silicone always contains a siloxane backbone). Because the concentration of the silicone in the product is given as a percentage, not a molar concentration, it simplifies the calculation. Additionally, this product is really a stabilized emulsion, not an aqueous solution, so we can't really calculate a molarity like we would with traditional solutions.

 

[brandonnys]

Back to the FDA 10 ppm. This is a limit they they are sure causes no harm based on seeing quantities 1000x more than this quantity causing no harm.

I asked Five Star to comment on this specifically, as well as Defoamer 105's fallout in trub/metabolization with yeast. Hopefully they will have something for us. The CFR did mention that the concentration can be higher, and seems to imply that cooking it will cause it to either denature or fall out of the emulsion. Am I making a leap here?

 

[Dustbowl]

I believe this is the amount of the product that it would be ok to add into the keg of finished beer if you could manage to keep it in solution and not stick to the yeast at the bottom of the keg, any fining agents, the walls of the keg etc. Defoamer added earlier in the process is supposed to drop out during the process. I believe it does stick to trub and yeast. BSG claims it is all gone at end of the process, some sticks to yeast, some to the fermentation vessel, etc. I believe this is maybe mostly true (maybe there is detectable level that makes it through but lets agree it is something less than the initial dosing. I'm comfortable with this assumption based on seeing zero impact on head formation and retention in beers brewed with Fermacp S in the boil or fermentor.

Back to the FDA 10 ppm. This is a limit they they are sure causes no harm based on seeing quantities 1000x more than this quantity causing no harm.

I would very much agree with you that very little of the silicone added will end up in the finished beer and even adding large amounts would likely not result in any negative health effects; the calculations were just based on worst case scenario (all silicone added present in the final beer). The addition of clarifying agents will also result in a great deal of removal of the silicone from the wort, in addition to adsorption to the wide variety of proteins in the cold break as well as the yeast.

Also, I reviewed the toxicological data on ToxNet (https://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/a?dbs+hsdbterm+@DOCNO+1444) and I'm not entirely sold on the limitation in food products actually being based on observed toxicity in either animal or humans. It really appears that very little silicone is actually absorbed from ingestion (<5%). In numerous animal studies with these compounds caused no negative health effects when ingested. Most negative health outcomes appear to be from medical applications via injection of silicone to treat various conditions and appear to be exceedingly rare.

I wonder if some of the concern is based on environmental accumulation of silicone via excretion from the food consumer, but I really have no evidence/source to back that up...

 

[brandonnys]

RESPONSE FROM FIVE STAR

I am {I've removed the name} and I am the chemical engineer here at Five Star.

To answer your question: in ONE GALLON of wort, to stay below the 200ppm FDA allowance of silicone you can add up to 15 drops of defoamer 105 which is equivalent to about .75 mL or .025 fluid oz.

If the bottle tip does not dispense properly in the future, simple make sure the product is shaken properly, it is not older than 2 years, and use a simple pin to clear the dropper.

No official research has been conducted as to how the defoamer settles out by Five Star.

Hopefully this helps!

 

[dyqik]

(10 nL/L, this is 10 ppm) x (19L, this is 5 gallons of wort into the fermenter) = 190 nL silicone allowed per 5 gallons of finished wort.
!

I don't think this matters any more, but 10 nl/l is 10 ppb, not 10 ppm. nl is nanoliters, or 10^-9 l. 10 ppm is 10 ul/l.