*sigh*...
Where to begin? Brewing this year has been an utter failure on all fronts. Yesterday we got together to keg our first two brews and to brew another. Well, we opened up the carboys and all four of them greeted us with a strong sour smell. This was quite disheartening; we'd never had sanitation issues before and yet here two consecutive batches were contaminated. This calls for a serious re-evaluation of post-boil equipment and sanitization procedures thereof. We've identified a few possibilities:
- Counterflow chiller
- Is the inside of the copper tubing sanitized? We hose it out and run an iodophor solution through it every time. What we don't do is cap the ends when we put it away. Maybe something's got inside?
- Maybe we need to run boiling water through the whole line without the counterflowing cold water hooked up, to ensure that anything and everything that might be inside is boiled.
- Airstone
- We use an aquarium airstone to oxygenate the wort as it's being drained into the fermenters. We sanitize this also in the iodophor, but it's eight years old now and is looking a little haggard. Maybe it's not getting as clean as we need it to be?
- Fermenters
- I don't know how this could be the case; we scrub the glass carboys pretty well clean with sanitizer solution and hot water. They're clean, no question in my mind. But there's always a possibility.
Couple all this with the fact that the beers never produced any sort of krausen during fermentation (nor a pellicle, so I'm still confused), so the yeast never took hold, even using starters! Could the yeast have been not viable? Seems strange that two separate strains would be like that, so it would have to be a pretty strong coincidence. Who knows.
Anyways, that was disappointing, but we still had a brew day to look forward to, so that's exciting!
Except it was bad.
We did another BIAB batch, and put all 20lbs of our grain into one bag. Rather than tie it off and let it loose inside like the previous two brews, we draped it open over the lip of the pot and held it in place with clothes pins. Eventually, 15 minutes into the mash, I dropped the digital thermometer into the mash. I was able to fish it out immediately but the damage'd been done. We were now without temperature control, shooting in the dark.
Eventually we found another thermometer, and it read 120°. Yikes. So we fired the burner up. We got it up to 158° (with stirring) before killing the heat. We reached our target mash gravity of 18.5 brix, and a starch conversion test came back good, so we pulled the bag out to wring, and were greeted with this sad sight.
The bag had apparently been resting on the bottom of the pot and had a giant hole burnt into it when we turned the heat back on. Wonderful. That explains all the grains floating about in the kettle. Well, we figured it couldn't be that bad and proceeded with the boil and hop additions.
Once the boil was completed and we needed to drain through the chiller, though, it became apparent that it wouldn't work. The chiller clogged almost immediately. Every other attempt we made to extract the wort from the kettle also failed. Every attempt to chill it failed (bags of ice and ice packs). We destroyed our autosiphon in the process.
After an hour of trying to save it, we called it quits and dumped it unceremoniously down the driveway into the gutter. Grains covered a good twenty square feet of asphalt. That's a lot.
So, yeah. 0 for 3 so far this year. Shitty. I feel like I've never brewed before, that's how badly things are going.
On a positive note, I've begun acquiring parts for putting together the electric HERMS. We want to get it complete by the end of the summer so we can continue brewing indoors in the colder months, which wouldn't be possible with propane for obvious reasons.
That's the only good thing to come from brewing this year.
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