If are you like me, when you first read about putting olive oil in your beer you probably had a very confused and scared look on your face. You might have then thought maybe it is some slang analogy dealing with homebrewing. I am here to tell you it isn’t, you should actually add olive oil to your homebrew during primary fermentation!
First, the reason why. For those familiar with homebrewing, you know that aerating the wort can be important, especially for a brew that has a very high original gravity. Generally, this is done either by shaking around the carboy with the fresh wort inside, or you can buy a special aerating stone or pump.
Now for the cool part, you can use olive oil to “aerate” your wort. The process, detailed below, is absolutely simple. The reason this works is as follows. When yeast is getting ready to ferment, it takes in an oxygen atom from the wort in order to take a hydrogen atom away from an 18 carbon chain unsaturated fatty acid, which makes an 18 monosaturated fatty acid, which helps the yeast grow. Now, olive oil just happens to be made of these 18 carbon monosaturated fatty acids. This means the yeast can just use these directly from the olive oil without having to make its own. This of course means the yeast does not need oxygen, and thus there is no need to do a real aeration. If you are saying to yourself, “That is crazy!”, you are right, it is! I had the exact same reaction. The technique was developed at University of Leuven in Belgium and put to practice at New Belgium Brewing. Those Belgians sure know how to get homebrewers excited! Since you are essentially skipping the aeration process with a much easier and equivalent process, the fermentation can also start occurring much quicker than it normally would and with the same intensive fermentation as if you had used a professional aeration system.
So how do you do it? It is very simple. All you need to do is take a toothpick and dip it in some olive oil, then stir it around in your yeast starter, or in your wort if you did not use a yeast starter. The trick is to use a very little amount of olive oil. Even a drop is too much(it will hurt head retention). That is why you need to use the toothpick trick.
From what I have read, you want to be careful(especially if you have never used an aerator before), as doing this trick will result in a much stronger fermentation, and possibly require use of your blowoff tube, so check your fermenting wort often!
I plan on doing this for my next batch of beer in a week or so, so I will let everyone know how it turns out. If anyone has tried this method, or plans on it, let me know!
You can read more here and here.
