Welding Oxygen Aeration Questions

[brewNOLA]

In my quest for ever-better homebrew, I purchased the necessary items to aerate with oxygen. Specifically welding oxygen purchased at Lowe's. So I brewed EdWort's Haus Pale Ale yesterday, hit the cooled wort with about 30sec of the O2 and then pitched a pack of Notty at about 4pm (wort temp was approx. 80 degrees F). Woke up this morning and looked at it at about 5:15 am and it had a nice think krausen on it and the yeast were moving about like they normally do without the pure O2 aeration. This evening, I get home from work about 6pm and find the airlock blown off and a large amount of foam around the opening of the carboy. (Temp at this point is 68 degrees F via a temp strip on outside of carboy.) Yeasties were moving around super vigorously at this point. So I put on a blowoff tube and cleaned everything up. I had good cold break on brewday and not many solids made it into the carboy which has been my problem with blowoffs before. I think it was just foam that caused this to happen. So my questions are:

1. Has anyone else experienced this?
2. Is welding oxygen safe to use? (should have asked this question BEFORE I did this)
3. For those brewers that use O2 and have the tanks, where do you store them? I am bit paranoid that the tank is going to explode and demolish the back part of my house.

 

[jakenbacon]

Nice work man. Looks tastey. I wouldn't worry about the oxygen tank exploding into a huge fire of death. You could shoot that thing with an incendiary round and it wouldn't explode like you think. It would just make a very loud noise and a huge plume of gas would be spewing out....


O ya, and it seems like a lot of people oxygenate the way you do....

 

[BigFloyd]

Welding O2 is just fine for wort. I use a 5lb tank from a small welding rig for mine. It sits in the corner of my garage where it won't get bumped.

You need not use oxygen with dry yeast. It has its own sterols which provide the needed O2 for the initial reproduction. My ferments with Nottingham, S-04, US-05, BRY-97 all take off just fine with minimal aeration (splashing) and rehydrating the dry yeast packet. I save the O2 rig for when I use liquid yeast (especially in lagers).

You pitched way too warm, especially for Nottingham. It then went crazy on you before you got it cooled to what is really the max temp (68*F) for that yeast. You're likely to get some pretty noticeable off-flavors because of that. Next time using Notty, get your wort chilled to about 58-60*F and keep the temp below 64*F for the first 4-5 days. It's an excellent yeast, but it has a cooler temp range than other dry ale yeasts.

 

[E_Marquez]

Nothing to do with you having used O2 from any source (Medical, refillable Welding tanks, disposable O2 cylinders)

You had a violent fermentation due to temps...

Folks say there is no need for O2 aeration in general.. Other folks say it helps.

Im in the, cant hurt category. And as I have everything on hand anyway, I use it.