Massive infection problem

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Prionburger

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So I picked up brewing in July after a short hiatus, and my new beers have have been more problematic than when I started last fall.

At first I thought the problem was chlorine, which I hadn't been treating for, but a week ago I noticed a drastic change in the amber ale I made. The bitterness changed to an unpleasant buttery dull bitterness. The sweet maltiness disappeared. The citrus aroma was replaced with a sick honey-like smell. The body became a little slimy. The normal beer tartness drops out. Later I noticed the bottles were gushing, and had specks on the necks of the bottles. In the older bottles there's even a pellicle film.

And then I noticed the same thing in beer after beer. I had been drinking them before the infections became noticable, but sure enough, the same sick honey aroma and gushing appeared in all my beers, whether carbonated to 1 volume or 3. I'm going to have to dump 5 batches at least :( I'm trying to drink my Janet's brown before it goes too :drunk:

I've tried getting new tubing, new spigots, disassembling the spigot for cleaning, nuking all my equipment with an overnight oxyclean soak and overnight iodophor soak (at 1 tbspn/5gal dilution). Also tried switching back to my glass carboy and even then, I'm detecting the same off flavor, and it's now starting to gush at 2 months.

So here's what I think I'll do:

1. Avoid the basement? I do everything down there except boiling. Even fermenting. It's damp, but it's the only place I can wash bottles efficiently. Maybe I can sanitize them upstairs but I'd be carrying the infection upstairs that way.

2. Dump all my plastic equipment, and replace them with silicone or metal where possible. Most glaring is my old bottling bucket, over a year old.

3. Switch from iodophor to starsan--maybe my infection is resistant, maybe my iodophor is contaminated or expired somehow (over a year old now).

4. Kegging! My house is filled with bugs, maybe I should just eliminate all this plastic crap and be done with it.

I'll RDWHACB for the time being. Any thoughts/commiseration? :mug:
 
there seems to be a lot of threads about infections recently.
oh no - the swine flu has mutated and is out to destroy our beer!!

seriously - sorry about your loss and i hope you can sanitize your way back to good brews.

good luck
 
Dang that sucks! I can't imagine dumping 5 brews. Sounds like you have a good plan of action. Do you mill anywhere near where you mash/transfer/ferment perhaps??
 
How much cash does you hobby consume? I spend a lot on my addiction, but here is what I'd suggest...

First, go for kegging now. Bottling is a pain in the ass.
Second, forget chilling. Go straight to glass carboy, and use tin foil. Water bath in tub until 85 degree F and pitch.
Third, use cheap grain alcohol or vodka in air lock and keep topped off.

See if problem is gone.

What are you using for chiller? Next step is to ad back chiller. For sanitation, immersion is best, next is counterflow, finally is plate. Recirc into boil for last 15 minute with hose submerges in BK. This obviously requres a pump. This also whirlpools but thats unrelated.

Finally, do not worry about foam in carboy. Keep it filled and dump right before your at pitch temp. Also sterilize yeast vial and pitch two vials or packs.

See if problem is gone.

If it is, read up on about how to make a starter. Also, remember that you have to clean before sanitation. Make sure everything is clean. Not insulting, just covering the bases.

Let me know how it works. I lived in a house with 4 drunk students (including me), dirty dishes, and filthe everywhere and made great beer. Let's troubleshoot the process and get to the bottom of it.
 
I transfer from the kettle to the fermenter in the kitchen, then I move it downstairs to the basement to ferment. I wash bottles and fill bottles in the basement too. Maybe the spoiled beer from dirty bottles and bottle filling spills has fed a population of wild yeast spores.

Maybe it's just one piece of my equipment that is causing the problems. Maybe if I replace the bottling bucket everything will be fixed, but I'm not sure I want to take the chance with yet another beer.

I'm fermenting two steam beers in my closet now, so I'll bottle those outside of the basement with a fresh set of plastic and a new bottling bucket.

Yeah, it sucks, but I had fun making those beers. Some of them were really good before they spoiled. I've also mastered my process hitting mash temps, gravities, and temperature control. When I get this bug out of the way it's going to be sweet.

RIP blonde ale, nut brown, amber, southern brown, and maybe steam beer, and dry stout :(
 
Prionburger said:
1. Avoid the basement? I do everything down there except boiling. Even fermenting. It's damp, but it's the only place I can wash bottles efficiently. Maybe I can sanitize them upstairs but I'd be carrying the infection upstairs that way.
Click to expand...
Prionburger said:
3. Switch from iodophor to starsan--maybe my infection is resistant, maybe my iodophor is contaminated or expired somehow (over a year old now).
Click to expand...
Switching to star-san may be a good idea. Iodophor supposedly leaves no residue, but star-san (at the proper concentration) leaves a very thin film with a low pH (acidic) that will continue to kill microbes that land on it. So if you wash your bottles in the basement and then immediately hit them with star-san, it shouldn't matter too much if there are germs in the air down there.

Are you sanitizing your bottle caps? How soon before bottling do you sanitize? Describe your bottling procedure.

Prionburger said:
2. Dump all my plastic equipment, and replace them with silicone or metal where possible. Most glaring is my old bottling bucket, over a year old.
Click to expand...
Anything plastic is a likely culprit. Especially the bottling bucket. Small pieces of plastic equipment (short tubes, fittings, etc) could probably be fully sterilized by dropping them into a pot of boiling water for 15 minutes, but if they are susceptible to infection in the first place, then you are going to have to sterilize them in this way before every use from here on out.
Prionburger said:
4. Kegging! My house is filled with bugs, maybe I should just eliminate all this plastic crap and be done with it.
Click to expand...
You're gonna be awfully disappointed if you blow a bunch of money on a kegging setup only to find that you still haven't resolved the sanitation issue and thus your beer is still going bad...
 
Also, maybe consider doing smaller batches until you get two or three in a row that don't go bad, that way you aren't risking $30-50 in ingredients every time.
 
Do you completly disassemble the spigot on the bottling bucket? I do not just mean unscrewing and seperating the spigot from the bucket.

You can pull the piece that controls the flop out of the rest of the assembly. If you don't pull this apart , clean and sanitize you are almost guranteed to get and infection after a few batches.
 
@Beercrazy

I try to spend as little as I can on the hobby. The only reason I've made so many batches is because I'd brew a new one whenever a batch came out bad. I'd probably go for the cheapest keg setup possible, with picnic taps.

I already use cheap vodka in my airlocks. I use an immersion chiller, scrubbed clean in tapwater before use 30 mins before the end of the boil.

To make starters I use the MrMalty calculator with intermittent shaking and paying attention to expiration date. However, I do this in a glass jug nuked with oxyclean, rinsed thoroughly, then sanitized with no-rinse iodophor. I already have the ingredients for a brown porter, so I think I'll do that again, but with a fresh supply of starsan instead.

My latest steam beer was fermented with a brand new bucket, but bottled with the same old bucket and racking cane/hose. If the bug is hiding in one of my better bottles or airlock stoppers, I'll know.
 
Dr Vorlauf said:
Do you completly disassemble the spigot on the bottling bucket? I do not just mean unscrewing and seperating the spigot from the bucket.

You can pull the piece that controls the flop out of the rest of the assembly. If you don't pull this apart , clean and sanitize you are almost guranteed to get and infection after a few batches.
Click to expand...

huh? mine dont come apart. i invert and fill with starsan for a few minutes while i sanitize the keg and cane. havent had a problem in that area.
 
Your beer is only becoming infected after bottling, right? It always comes out of the fermenter fine, tastes fine in the bottle at first, and then all the bottles eventually go bad? That suggests that your bottling process is almost certainly the point at which the germs are getting into the beer. If you were getting contamination at a different stage of the process, like during chilling, or yeast pitching, then you'd probably have a fermenter full of infected undrinkable beer by the time it came to bottle it.
 
Prionburger said:
@Beercrazy

I try to spend as little as I can on the hobby. The only reason I've made so many batches is because I'd brew a new one whenever a batch came out bad. I'd probably go for the cheapest keg setup possible, with picnic taps.

I already use cheap vodka in my airlocks. I use an immersion chiller, scrubbed clean in tapwater before use 30 mins before the end of the boil.

To make starters I use the MrMalty calculator with intermittent shaking and paying attention to expiration date. However, I do this in a glass jug nuked with oxyclean, rinsed thoroughly, then sanitized with no-rinse iodophor. I already have the ingredients for a brown porter, so I think I'll do that again, but with a fresh supply of starsan instead.

My latest steam beer was fermented with a brand new bucket, but bottled with the same old bucket and racking cane/hose. If the bug is hiding in one of my better bottles or airlock stoppers, I'll know.
Click to expand...

Are either scratched? A proper application of sanitizer shouldn't let a large colony survive. If you really want a $6 answer, pitch two tubes of yeast with no starter. For an extra $2 replace bung and airlock. My gut feeling is that contamination is occurring at the starter. Have you tasted the starter?

But I'm worried that you say they "get infected"? Is this for sure post bottling? If that's the case, get a corny, carb with priming sugar in corny, use siphon with a lot of head (i.e. put corny on ladder) and bottle without bucket. $30 test.
 
@ Vorlauf

Yeah, I saw the infected spigot thread and started cleaning the spigot that way about 3 batches ago. I'll know if that fixed it soon.
 
I've definitely had fantastic tasting beer coming out of the fermenter. The only beer that tasted bad coming out of the fermenter was a brown porter fermented with a questionable nottingham packet, which suffered a nasty cold snap while fermenting. That doesn't rule out an infection occurring pre-bottling though. It's a slow bug that takes a month to surface.

If it's not an environmental thing, then it's most likely in the airlock hoods (those orange rubber things with 2 holes), the airlocks themselves, or the bottling equipment.

That, or my sanitizer is compromised somehow. I've paid close attention to the directions though.
 
I've had the same infection in batches with starters and without, so I'm confident that the starters aren't the culprit. I use loose tinfoil covers instead of airlocks on my starters, like Jamil does. I also ferment them outside the basement, in an environment with no drafts, and a constant temperature. The starter wort also tastes fine.
 
@ReeseAllen

True, if I switch to kegs and still have infection issues I'll be disappointed. And I will try completely new plastics, sanitizer, and fermentation environments before making the switch. However, I have gone beyond anal with my cleaning lately. Even with new equipment, I easily spend 4 hours washing bottles and equipment for each batch. For fast turnover beers, kegging would be quite a relief.
 
Well, a bucket/carboy full of unfermented beer is the easiest target for germs. No alcohol to kill them and lots of sugar to eat. As the beer ferments and gets stronger and less sugary, life gets harder and harder for microbes. I would expect that if you had contamination before fermentation began, you'd definitely see the infection before fermentation was completed. But I've never had an infection myself, so I'm kinda talking out of my ass :) I just drench all my equipment and work surfaces compulsively with star-san using my spray bottle and it seems to have paid off so far.
 
Ok, I just bottled a dry stout, and it's even worse than anything I've bottled before. Downright putrid. It tasted weird out of the fermenter, and didn't attenuate (stayed at 1.016 instead of the target 1.010-1.012). I held it at 70F after it fermented at ~66, but the final gravity didn't move. It was fermented in a glass carboy in the basement, and the wort was exposed to basement air briefly, and I used an old carboy cap and airlock. So whereas my bottling bucket is suspect, I am confident that my beer is being infected during or before fermentation.

So here's my plan. I have the ingredients for a brown porter (JZ's) from brewmaster's warehouse. It's been about a month since I've recieved it so it may be a little stale since it's crushed already, but it's in sealed plastic. I'm going to brew it and ferment it in my glass carboy. Here's how I'll switch it up:

1. Nuke the heck out of my glass carboy. This time I'll replace the plastic stopper and airlock, and give the carboy many scoops of oxyclean and soak it for a few days, scrub it down and rinse like crazy, and sanitize everything with starsan.

2. I'll carefully heat sterilize my cheap glass gallon starter jug in the oven instead of treating with no-rinse. I'll invest in a metal funnel which can also be heat sterilized in the oven to transfer starter wort into the jug. This way I'll whip up a perfect london ale starter.

3. Ferment in my room, not in the basement.

3. For bottling, I'll carefully clean and scrub all of my bottles, then I'll heat sterilize them as well, and fill them with entirely new plastic equipment.

From then on, I'm going to make small batches of cheap blonde ale until I figure this out.


:tank:
 
I have a feeling you will find success. You appear to attack the problem methodically and take advice, change it and implement it.

Good luck.
 
BeerCrazy said:
Second, forget chilling. Go straight to glass carboy, and use tin foil. Water bath in tub until 85 degree F and pitch.
Click to expand...

I could swear I've read this is a bad idea with non-Pyrex glass... wouldn't the shock from dumping boiling wort into a non-Pyrex carboy, especially if dumped into an ice bath immediately afterwards, crack it for sure??
 
MrInternet said:
I could swear I've read this is a bad idea with non-Pyrex glass... wouldn't the shock from dumping boiling wort into a non-Pyrex carboy, especially if dumped into an ice bath immediately afterwards, crack it for sure??
Click to expand...

I suspect so. No way I am putting anything hotter than my tap water into a carboy.
 
Yeah I'm not going to do that in my glass carboy, haha.

If my next steps don't work, I will take his advice and go back to my old bathtub chilling method to find if my brew kettle or wort chiller are to blame.

I am somewhat cautious about heat sterilizing my bottles and starter jug, but some folks on HBT have done it before. Hopefully it works. I may no-rinse sanatize a few to see if there's a difference.
 
The bottling spigots will come apart but you have to get them fairly hot so they will come apart. They trap liquid between the parts.

Hope you figure this out.
 
Right, I've done that the last 3 batches. I'll make sure there's a layer of starsan between the pieces.

I've already bought the starsan, a new airlock and stopper. Carboy has 3 scoops of oxyclean in it. :cross:

Maybe I should bleach it next.

Then atomic weapons.

:rockin:
 
Prionburger said:
So I picked up brewing in July after a short hiatus, and my new beers have have been more problematic than when I started last fall.

At first I thought the problem was chlorine, which I hadn't been treating for, but a week ago I noticed a drastic change in the amber ale I made. The bitterness changed to an unpleasant buttery dull bitterness. The sweet maltiness disappeared. The citrus aroma was replaced with a sick honey-like smell. The body became a little slimy. The normal beer tartness drops out. Later I noticed the bottles were gushing, and had specks on the necks of the bottles. In the older bottles there's even a pellicle film.

And then I noticed the same thing in beer after beer. I had been drinking them before the infections became noticable, but sure enough, the same sick honey aroma and gushing appeared in all my beers, whether carbonated to 1 volume or 3. I'm going to have to dump 5 batches at least :( I'm trying to drink my Janet's brown before it goes too :drunk:

I've tried getting new tubing, new spigots, disassembling the spigot for cleaning, nuking all my equipment with an overnight oxyclean soak and overnight iodophor soak (at 1 tbspn/5gal dilution). Also tried switching back to my glass carboy and even then, I'm detecting the same off flavor, and it's now starting to gush at 2 months.

So here's what I think I'll do:

1. Avoid the basement? I do everything down there except boiling. Even fermenting. It's damp, but it's the only place I can wash bottles efficiently. Maybe I can sanitize them upstairs but I'd be carrying the infection upstairs that way.

2. Dump all my plastic equipment, and replace them with silicone or metal where possible. Most glaring is my old bottling bucket, over a year old.

3. Switch from iodophor to starsan--maybe my infection is resistant, maybe my iodophor is contaminated or expired somehow (over a year old now).

4. Kegging! My house is filled with bugs, maybe I should just eliminate all this plastic crap and be done with it.

I'll RDWHACB for the time being. Any thoughts/commiseration? :mug:
Click to expand...

Check your sump-pump if you have one. Pour some bleach in there and let it sit overnight.
 
Dr Vorlauf said:
Do you completly disassemble the spigot on the bottling bucket? I do not just mean unscrewing and seperating the spigot from the bucket.

You can pull the piece that controls the flop out of the rest of the assembly. If you don't pull this apart , clean and sanitize you are almost guranteed to get and infection after a few batches.
Click to expand...

I've been using the same two plastic bucket fermenters equipped with spigots for nearly ten years. I've never disassembled the spigots and haven't had any infections. Just lucky I guess.
 
Here's an update!

The dry stout (JZ recipe) which I brewed on October 21, fermented with London Ale yeast, and bottled November 30th (I know), which finished high (target 1.010 FG but got 1.016), and was extremely gross until now, has actually become drinkable and rather pleasant. I suppose it's a sweet stout... but way outside the style guides with 2.8% abv.

I'm going to blame mash and fermentation temp fluctuations on the results. Both went up and down, giving me less attenuation and more un-fermentables. But I must have lucked out on this one, because I'm getting no cardboard/gushing/dullness, no sign of wild yeast, thanks to luck and extremely anal cleaning. And at 45 IBUs, it can take the sweetness easily! The result appears to have been a diacetyl overload, and an overload of esters from London Ale, described as "oakey." Now that nasty aroma is just a hint, and will probably go away entirely.

So anyways, here I am with a basic keg kit from keg connection. I got one keg, a 15 lb cylinder, and a tap-rite regulator. I'm going to keg a brown porter. The only equipment piece I'm reusing is the glass carboy, every plastic piece is new. Excited!
 
Hopefully you will have the same outcome that I had which was pretty close to what happened to your beers. I had 2-3 bad bottled batches and was using iodaphor. I switched to StarSan and kegs and the problem went away. Good Luck
 
BeerCrazy said:
......
Second, forget chilling. Go straight to glass carboy, and use tin foil. Water bath in tub until 85 degree F and pitch......
Click to expand...

I STRONGLY advise against this practice! I can almost guarantee broken shards of glass in your future if you do. This type of glass is not designed for extreme temperature shocks.
 
I would get new plasic, avoid the basement when at all possible and buy some star san. I have not had a single infection issue since using star san.
 
Change your sanitizer! Try this one STAR-SAN

Your "house" bugs can build up a resistance to sanitizers.

Go back to dry yeasts.

Double check you practices with your IC. I boil mine than let it sit in a bucket of star-san before I use it.

How do you clean your bottles ?

Oxi-clean soak for 24+ hours works really well.

Here's to you getting over this hump.

-Jason
 
Yep, this Brown porter batch used all new plastics (everything), and was the first batch that I used Star-San on.

I'm cleaning up now, and it seems everything has gone smoothly with the brown porter. Only downer was that my porter finished a little high (1.015 instead of 1.013). Otherwise, it smelled fine, tasted pretty good. It has a bit more tang than my previous few beers, which is a good sign. I'll report back on how it turns out.
 
Oh yeah, and for bottles I first blast them a jet of hot water, then soak them in oxi-clean for at least 24 hours, sometimes a week. I then rinse the heck out of them before sanitizing.

I've noticed a film on the inside of some of my old bottles after emptying infected beer out of them. I think I should scrub those bottles, or throw them away altogether.

I have two carboys of california common that are just about ready to bottle. With those, I'm going to oven-sterilize the bottles after sanitizing them with star-san.

After this it's cheap blondes and pale ales with dry yeast until I iron out the problems.
 
+1 to sterilizing whatever you can with heat, replacing plastic.

I don't think switching to kegging would help, in fact its just another variable to consider. I'd only switch if you were going to anyway (which everyone does at some point I guess)
 
Prionburger said:
Oh yeah, and for bottles I first blast them a jet of hot water, then soak them in oxi-clean for at least 24 hours, sometimes a week. I then rinse the heck out of them before sanitizing.

I've noticed a film on the inside of some of my old bottles after emptying infected beer out of them. I think I should scrub those bottles, or throw them away altogether.

I have two carboys of california common that are just about ready to bottle. With those, I'm going to oven-sterilize the bottles after sanitizing them with star-san.

After this it's cheap blondes and pale ales with dry yeast until I iron out the problems.
Click to expand...

Waste of sanitizer. Try a cleaner if you are going to heat sterilize.
 
bull8042 said:
I STRONGLY advise against this practice! I can almost guarantee broken shards of glass in your future if you do. This type of glass is not designed for extreme temperature shocks.
Click to expand...

I did this before an immersion chiller. Thermal shock is a concern with glass, but one of the four variables in determining thermal shock resiliency is material strength. In this area a glass carboy does decent.

I never had an issue taking a room temp carboy and filling with 195 or so degree wort. Let the first 10-20 degree drop occur in the pot as it will still be above pasteurization temp. As the fluid enters carboy it will run down the sides and not have significant thermal mass to quickly change the vessel temp if your flow rate leaving the bk is anything close to slow. For this reason, I was always more concerned about the water bath than the filling.

I used a bathtub and let it sit for half hour before filling tub with water. Let sit and lands about 85.

All this said, be careful but you can minimize the risk of thermal shock by using some common since. I have chillers and when first started out used a carboy and quickly switched to buckets cause they are easier, cheaper, safer, and lighter. I have both and only use carboys when the conicals and buckets are full.

I'm still inclined to wander if yeast handling isn't the weak link... A good pitch is important in preventing infection.
 

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