Re: Can ethanol emulsify olive oil?

Bob wrote:

snip

Olive oil should certainly be soluble in ethanol at 1%. Your proposed
method is logically fine.

One way to explore a bit is to exaggerate... Try making a solution at
5% (5 drops oil + 95 drops alcohol) and see what it looks like. It
will be better at 1%, but harder to see.
A caution... The effect of the olive oil on your product may not scale
simply. The olive oil is probably doing more than one thing -- as you
note when you mention foam. So try it and see what happens; you may
want to experiment with how much you add.

bob

Thank you VERY much, Bob, (and Bill Penrose, next post) for taking the time to reply ... and so quickly. Yes, I will need to experiment a bit with this. Since it's been done on a commercial level already, it will probably be pretty safe so long as I can limit quantity proportionately to what the New Belgium Brewery did. As explained, that will require a diluted solution as I described, or perhaps using the procedure that Bill Penrose outlined, which sounds a bit more difficult but is a good alternative idea. Bill mentioned his idea because oil might stick to the glass when I attempt to dilute it, but if that can be resolved, I think it would be infinitely easier for me to count drops to know the dilution level as opposed to trying to measure and divide surface area. However, if he is correct about oil sticking to the glass, his procedure might be the only practical way to do it. So, my follow-up question is this: if I do add one drop of olive oil to 99 drops of ethanol, while it might want to cling to the glass initially, will sufficient shaking of the vial break or dissolve the oil away from the glass and emulsify it? And by the way, I can work with larger quantities such as 10 drops of oil and 990 drops of ethanol if the larger amount will shake up better and decrease the amount of oil that might stick to the glass.

Also, which would be better -- relatively pure ethanol or vodka? I don't know if a bit of water would help or hurt. Everclear is 97.5% ethanol and 2.5% water; 100-proof vodka is 50% ethanol and 50% water.

Thanks in advance for any follow up advice. If you're ever in central Arkansas, I'll have to treat you to some of my homebrews. :-)

By the way, if you're curious about why olive oil might be added to fermenting beer, it is to eliminate the need to aerate the wort, which is a bit difficult to do very well. Here is a brief excerpt from the explanation from New Belgium:

> "The basic concept is that since yeast uses an oxygen atom to pull a
> hydrogen away from an 18 carbon chain unsaturated fatty acid to make a
> monounsaturated fatty acid chain to help it grow, you could simply
> provide an 18 carbon monounsaturated fatty acid and it would be able
> to use that. This works well in practice, we made a little over
> 1 million bottles with beer where the yeast had had olive oil added.

Thanks again.

Bill Velek
.

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