rutheyrocks
Active Member
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2021
- Messages
- 27
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- 17
You're the beery-godmother!!! haha! Thank you so much!! I'm going to exactly that!!! I will let you know how it goes!!
I get that! I enjoy building a recipe and trying it out when I've got left over ingredients. If your batches are seeming one note or meh, I recommend some specialty grains/malts. For a bohemian lager, I recommend Munich and Carapils, two ounces of each(if you're doing two gallon batches).
Mandarina Bavaria and Cascade can give you the orange/citrus flavors. Saaz hops are so nice for a bit of spice and when with Mandarina Bavaria, make for a lovely combo.
Briess makes Pilsen Light extract and find that makes many good styles of lighter beers. I just recently finished up my first "big beer", OG of 1.077, a lovely Belgian Golden Strong Ale. My very first ever batch was five gallons of a Bavarian Hefeweizen.
Don't ever get so down on yourself to think about dumping a beer before it's done. There's always something you can do to get a beer moving if it hasn't taken off or if it's stuck. Like Father Papazian once said, " Relax, don't worry, have a home brew".
If you're looking to get the gravity up, I would boil some water, making a starter of sorts, and then adding it to your fermenter. Sanitation is key, everything you touch or the wort comes in contact with needs a spray of Star San. If you ever need any help, feel free to reach out.
On another note, my lovely first IPA.. I made a 8 bottles... has become horribly sour!!
I was pretty hot on the sanitising.. but maybe not enough... how on earth do you make large batches and keep the beasties out?
Welcome to HBT. Sorry that your IPA went sour.
Are you using a sanitizer like Star-san or something equivalent? Also, each bottle needs to be inspected by holding it up to a bright light and looking through the opening, its not unusual to have debris in the bottom of bottles. If something isn't clean, it can't be sanitized.
I'm not sure if that's actually true, but that's the rule I go by. So all of your bottling gear has to be sanitized before use. Your clean bottles should be immersed in sanitizer, dumped out and then filled. The caps should be in a bowl of sanitizer until used. When you sanitize you siphon, keep it in the bucket of sanitizer until you are going to use it. Star-san can be used several times, I keep a 2.5 gallon bucket of the soulution ready all the time in case I need to sanitize something.
Everyone has their own bottling routine, but I would suggest watching some U-tube videos and see how others are doing it.
Slow chilling your beer isn't the problem, I mostly brew in the winter and just set the brewpot out in the cold and in the morning the wort is pitching temperature. In the summertime I do use an immersion chiller though.
Check a couple more bottles of the IPA.
If all the bottles are sour then the contamination occurred before bottling. It was in your fermentor or perhaps tubing that was used to get the beer into bottles but no particular concerns about the bottles themselves.
If some of the bottles are contaminated and others are not you need to work on you your process for cleaning and sanitizing the bottles.
Here is the Brewers Friend total recipe builder calculator. I think you will find it hugely useful in building recipes and calculating ingredients:
https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator
Yes, I'll try a few more bottles - we had two good ones, and two awful ones.. the difference was a few weeks between drinking. fingers crossed my larger batch of 'lager' won't suffer the same fate!!!
I'm even more impressed by those who manage to do this on a larger scale.. I thought I was pretty careful!!
Thanks for the tips!!
I think I need to get my hands on some Star San... the stuff I use needs to be diluted, perhaps I just wasn't thorough enough...
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