brewing under pressure

At first I assumed that you were talking about fermenting under pressure. After re-reading your note, I'm not so sure... you could mean to pressurize the boiling part of the process.

1. There is literature about FERMENTING under pressure. A quick google found a reference like: "... Teri Fahrendorf's excellent article _Closed System Pressurized Fermentation_ in the 1992 special issue of Zymurgy." and I know it has been discussed so you can probably find a lot on it.
2. If you mean pressurized boil... then I doubt it would be beneficial for a couple reasons. One is that you usually want to have some evaporation from the boil to get your volume down and your gravity right (I know that there just was a big discussion in rec.crafts.brewing on covered vs. uncovered boils and evaporation - and I don't want to add "pressurized" to that discussion). Second, the biggest reason not to do it is that you want to boil off a lot of undesirable flavor compounds such as DMS and a pressure cooker seems like it would trap those.
3. Now, there are references to using a pressure cooker to do the decoction part of the brewing process. I intend to try this one day, however it seems to be you'd have to be very careful to guard against the boiling grain plugging up your steam vent! There are web pages about this around too.

Derric

ahh, quickdraw steve. nice to see you hear. seems we share the same to interests, landrovers and beer-brewing. fancy that hey? i haven't been posting on the landrover forum for quite a while because outlook express refuses to send my posts. will have to investigate the problem sometime as i am fairly annoyed with it!!

cheers.

sam.

Arrgh. Be it so, Land Rovers & beer. In answer to Derric's question, I was referring to fermenting under low pressure. I will check out the web leads you gave me. Remember Sam, beer and land rovers don't really mix all that well. Also, there's plenty of other mail and news programs if outlook is giving you grief.

-- PS. The QuickDraw Steve comes from using CorelDraw most of the day and I reckon I'm pretty quick at it. (You'll find me lurking on most of the Corel NG's as well).

-- Steve W

seems to be working now.

and i know that it is best not to pursue these two interests simultaneously.