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claphamsa

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so, made an alt.... fine, primary 2 months..... fine, racked into a better bottle to age for a while... (i ferment in 6G buckets, and use 5G as secondaries) put the better bottle in the corner.... next to a Flanders red (oops) apparently the infection jumped into the better bottle! i noticed a pelicle forming, so i quick racked it into a bucket to see if i could get it out from under. just checked... to say it didn't work would be an understatement!

so now, I have 2 sour autospyhons...

a 5G better bottle soaking in bleach-will this save it? do i chuck it?

I have a 6,.5 G bucket..... bleach wont help will it? its just storage now... right?

assuming the better bottle is salvage able, how long to bleach? ill get a new bung this weekend....
 
never use plastic for a sour beer AND a non sour beer. your just asking for trouble. like you got this time. use separate plastic containers for both styles of beer.
 
Time for a new better bottle, autosyphon, and bucket. Seriously, you need to get new plastic in my opinion. Others may disagree.
 
yeah, im gonna stop bye the store and get a new syphon.. kinda annoys me that I now have 2 sour only syphons! U need one?
 
You might have to move. J/k of course, but... a friend of mine put a fermenter on the workbench in his garage, near where he had fermented his flanders over a year prior, and ended up with a funky brew. Those sour bugs are some tough SOBs. Id love to attempt some sours, but losing control kinda scares me.
 
You might have to move. J/k of course, but... a friend of mine put a fermenter on the workbench in his garage, near where he had fermented his flanders over a year prior, and ended up with a funky brew. Those sour bugs are some tough SOBs. Id love to attempt some sours, but losing control kinda scares me.

yeah... me too :(
 
I used my bottling bucket to bottle a lambic a few weeks ago. I am now bleaching it in hopes that it will kill all the sour bugs before I bottle my blonde today. Here's hoping everything goes smoothly. If all goes bad at least it is only a gallon batch of blonde!
 
a friend of mine put a fermenter on the workbench in his garage, near where he had fermented his flanders over a year prior, and ended up with a funky brew. Those sour bugs are some tough SOBs. Id love to attempt some sours, but losing control kinda scares me.

are you telling me a brewing workspace with a few sour beers aging can possibly infect a whole room, or in my case, closet? how do you starsan a whole room?!? was the subject "fermenter on the workbench" an open bucket being stored, then was used for primary and soured the subject beer? that would make more sense...


seriously though, how does this happen? in the case of the OP, do better bottles breathe the same way plastic buckets do? i was under the impression they're most similar to glass and don't allow air to pass through the plastic. will this happen if aging in glass w/ airlock? just doesn't seem possible for the brett/lacto/pedio to invade when you have an air lock & glass. am i mistaken?
 
I'm not sure what type of vessels were used, but my first question to him was if it was the same fermenter, and he assured me it was a different one. If I end up doing sours, I'll be using dedicated equipment at someone else's house.
 
masonsjax, I have a 6.9G bucket you can have if you want it :)

Ive used glass for all my intentionally sour ones, and had no problems reusing them for non sour stuff (although im looking forward to using my baby barrels)
 
I've done several rounds of sour/non-sour beers in BBs and I've never once suffered an unintentional infection as a result. Brett has a reputation for being hard to kill, but that is unwarranted in my opinion. What it does do is settle into porous surfaces and surface scratches. If you're scratching the inside of your BB, you're doing something very wrong. It dies as easily as any other organism with the application of either heat or a strong bleach solution.

Dedicating different transfer equipment isn't necessary if you follow rigorous cleaning and sanitation practices, though I can see where it might provide peace of mind. Consider replacing your bungs, or at least dedicating those to sour beers.

Remember, wild yeast and bacteria are ubiquitous to the environment.
 
I can definitely see not using pails and bungs between sour and non-sour, but geesh, splitting the brewery seems excessive. If an infection carries over to a non-sour it just means your sanitation is sub-par and you just as easily could have gotten an infection from wild yeast or bacteria. My 2c anyway...
 
I can definitely see not using pails and bungs between sour and non-sour, but geesh, splitting the brewery seems excessive. If an infection carries over to a non-sour it just means your sanitation is sub-par and you just as easily could have gotten an infection from wild yeast or bacteria. My 2c anyway...

Exactly my point.
 
I have to apologize for misquoting the story. I looked back at the email from my friend and saw that it wasn't a fresh batch that got ruined, it was a pint glass that he had poured himself while working in the garage and forgot about. Upon finding it, it had become sour, supposedly from bugs remaining from the sour batch he had fermented on that workbench. Still scary to me, but I guess not too bad if you're careful.
 
While I agree, regimented sanitization is critical in homebrewing (for any type of beer), I still like to stack the odds in my favor. I choose to have dedicated equipment for everything post boil when it comes to sours. I also have different parts of my basement that I choose to ferment my beers in. Mike T (Oldsock on this site) did a flanders barrel project then a non sour barrel project with the barrels near each other. The bugs jumped from the sour barrel to the non-sour barrel. If you are nto familiar with Mike and the guys he brews with,, they may be some of the more technical brewers I am aware of.
 
I have to apologize for misquoting the story. I looked back at the email from my friend and saw that it wasn't a fresh batch that got ruined, it was a pint glass that he had poured himself while working in the garage and forgot about. Upon finding it, it had become sour, supposedly from bugs remaining from the sour batch he had fermented on that workbench. Still scary to me, but I guess not too bad if you're careful.

You leave anything out with sugars in it, and it will sour. Thats got nothing to do with prior batches.
 
Mike T (Oldsock on this site) did a flanders barrel project then a non sour barrel project with the barrels near each other. The bugs jumped from the sour barrel to the non-sour barrel.

Eh. I think sterilizing a barrel would be pretty tough to do, so its entirely possible that the barrel had brett/lacto in it before anything went in. IF you don't think plastic can be cleaned of brett, theres absolutely no friggen way wood can.
 
Proper sanitation has always worked for me. Have yet to infect a normal batch after racking off a wild beer.

..Hopefully doesn't happen tomorrow =x
 
Very interesting thread. I've done batches in glass and BBs, sour and not, right next to each other in my basement and never had a problem of sour jumping over to infect a "clean" one. I have never tried to rid the BB of the sour yet (it's got about a year to go), so not sure about reclamation after the fact. I basically knew it would be a sour only BB, and was ok with that...
 
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