Batting 0.000 so far...

*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:

New brew system

So I'm always wanting to get back to a HERMS setup. There are pros and cons to both HERMS and BIAB, but for my money I like the level of direct control afforded by HERMS.

So I started planning one out and, in the process, decided to make a Sketchup model. Behold!

HERMS by antaydos on Sketchfab

Kinda awesome, I know.

Brew day summary

Well, we've got lots to talk about lately, surrounding mash efficiency and assumptions in calculations. To that end, we'll start with the last brew #29.

We had some weird issues with fermentation, in that neither produced a krausen. The environment was 55°F, which is obviously out of optimal range but still high enough to get the yeast going. Sure enough, there was airlock activity, but the lack of a krausen had us concerned that maybe something besides the yeast had taken a hold. Still, we saw no pellicle that would indicate infection. Hmm...

Brewday #1 2015 Success!

We just completed our first brew of the season yesterday, and you can read about it here. However, in this post, I'd like to talk about what could have gone wrong. Mind you, the brew was successful, we made good wort (now the yeast has to make beer), but things weren't as good as they could/should have been. Here I will discuss my thoughts.

Goodbye Winter!

Well, with the winter thaw upon us and temperatures rising, it's time to say goodbye to winter and hello to spring and, with it, brewing season 2015!

Since it went over well with folk, we're going to get started this coming Sunday with an all-grain recreation of our last brown ale. We still haven't had a chance to rebuild our HERM system, so we're going to do BIAB (brew in a bag). This adds some time, but not as much as a traditional all grain setup, as we won't have to worry about lautering and sparging and re-lautering, etc, etc.

Anyways, that's all for now. I just thought I'd share the good news.

Been a while...

... since the last update. I've previously written that we'd planned on entering our first homebrew competition this year with the New England Regional Homebrew Competition, by entering our Oaked Oatmeal Stout. Well, due to the flatness of the beers opened by the time of registration, we didn't bother.

That's all changed.

I've opened five more bottles and they've all been carbonated. So, that's awesome! Aside from being tasty, maybe we can still enter them into the comp! Nope. Registration hit its 450-entrant cap three days after opening. Sad face.

On the bright side, the beer is still yummy. Maybe I'll hold on to a couple for the next comp that rolls around.

Uh-oh...

Time for a mega disappointment. Yesterday I passed out four bottles of the Oaked Oatmeal Stout to some coworkers. Then, when I got home, I opened one and was greeted with.... nothing.

No hiss from popping the cap.

No foam when pouring.

No head on the beer.

It was completely not carbonated. It wouldn't be so bad except... I just gave four away in an attempt to impress! Clearly this would fail in that regard. The taste was still great, but the beer is just flat. What happened??

We did everything we were supposed to do to carbonate it. We filled the keg, primed it to 30psi, let it sit for three days to allow the CO₂ to permeate the beer, then bottled it. We even tried a couple glasses straight from the keg minutes before bottling, and it was carbonated! What gives?

Well, after reaching out on /r/homebrewing, it seems the general consensus is that it should have been chilled during the priming, because colder beer allows greater CO₂ suspension in the beer. Unfortunately, we omitted that step because we don't have the capability to refrigerate a keg. Looks like all our effort was for naught...

Some recommended using carbonation drops, but they're just simple priming sugars and require the beer to hold yeast in suspension. Given that this beer is six years old, I highly doubt there's any viable yeast remaining, so that's out the window. Regardless, I advised a couple coworkers (fellow homebrewers) who hadn't yet popped the beer to try adding a pinch of sugar and re-capping the bottles. After a week or so they can try the beer. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, one option we have is to simply empty the bottles back into a keg and prime it at a very high PSI (PSI vs ambient temperature leads to proper carbonation). Or we just enjoy it flat? Ugh. Not very tantalizing.

Further discussion is required.

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