Ok. So I'm a moderately experienced home brewer (~50 batches in). These days I tend to get results I'm very happy with with one exception -- recently I've had a string of bottle infections. I was hoping to give some details about where I am in my troubleshooting process because I'm not sure what to do next.
1. I all grain BIAB, occasionally switching to partial mash if I'm doing something high gravity. I ferment in 7gal plastic buckets (ropak) which I renewed last month.
2. All my tubing and my bottling wand was replaced last fall.
3. On bottling day, everything gets rinsed and sanitized with star san. I always clean everything when I'm done, so it all gets put away clean, but I don't PBW again at the beginning of a new session.
4. My bottles get sprayed out with a bottle sprayer and sanitized with a pump-action sprayer of star san, dried on a bottle tree.
5. I either carbonate with little sugar drops or with dextrose. When I do dextrose, I boil it in 1/2 a cup of water for a few seconds then dump it into my bottling bucket and start racking directly onto the hot solution.
6. My bottle infections aren't constant (it's not every batch) but recently they've been more frequent (1/4 rather than say 1/12), which is what prompted my string of rubber/plastic replacement.
What am I missing? What else should I try?
The only thing I can think of is that I frequently use older star san for sanitizing my bottles. Whenever I fill a fermenter with starsan, I save a gallon of it in a 1gal ropak bucket I have just bc its handy to have around. Everything I've read says it should last ages. I keep it covered, and I empty it and change it out every brew day (which is usually every weekend or every other weekend) so it's never that old anyway.
Thanks in advance for any help.
1. I all grain BIAB, occasionally switching to partial mash if I'm doing something high gravity. I ferment in 7gal plastic buckets (ropak) which I renewed last month.
2. All my tubing and my bottling wand was replaced last fall.
3. On bottling day, everything gets rinsed and sanitized with star san. I always clean everything when I'm done, so it all gets put away clean, but I don't PBW again at the beginning of a new session.
4. My bottles get sprayed out with a bottle sprayer and sanitized with a pump-action sprayer of star san, dried on a bottle tree.
5. I either carbonate with little sugar drops or with dextrose. When I do dextrose, I boil it in 1/2 a cup of water for a few seconds then dump it into my bottling bucket and start racking directly onto the hot solution.
6. My bottle infections aren't constant (it's not every batch) but recently they've been more frequent (1/4 rather than say 1/12), which is what prompted my string of rubber/plastic replacement.
What am I missing? What else should I try?
The only thing I can think of is that I frequently use older star san for sanitizing my bottles. Whenever I fill a fermenter with starsan, I save a gallon of it in a 1gal ropak bucket I have just bc its handy to have around. Everything I've read says it should last ages. I keep it covered, and I empty it and change it out every brew day (which is usually every weekend or every other weekend) so it's never that old anyway.
Thanks in advance for any help.