For anyone who can take time to read my saga below, it's more a post about my renewed excitement about brewing but it does eventually lead to a question.
As i've posted before, i had a great first run at homebrewing then it went to hell in a handbasket. My next 4 batches tasted like total crap. two were dumped. Since then I have replaced bucket fermenter with 6 gal better bottle and replaced my tubing. I recently crossed my fingers and got busy brewing a porter kit from Midwest with a liquid yeast vs. Munton's dry which I was using. I studied every aspect of my process and found two MAJOR potential culprits that i can't believe i didn't see:
1. In my old bucket fermenter, I had a Better Bottle pail adapter and simple-flo valve. When I cleaned and sanitized the bucket I never took any of that stuff apart. I soaked in PBW and Star-San'd. Turns out when I really looked in the inside the pail adapter/valve there was some caked-on trub or something that very likely was contributing to the nastiness of my beer. Don't know how long it had been there.
2. When I hooked up my wort chiller i found a very subtle leak that was flowing down the input side and making it's way down to the bottom of the coil. You really couldn't see it unless you held the chiller up. My tubing obviously was not tightly fitted to the chiller and I don't know when it got loose like that. Obvious problem being that I had water from outside running through a garden hose through a copper tubing into my chilled wort! Probably not a great thing for my beer. (I didn't use this chiller with my first batch, the only one that turned out good. I think that says something)
All that said, I'm hoping I've gotten back on track with this Porter. I took a sample after 4 days just to see how things were progressing and it was awesome. I'm going to take regular samples during fermentation to see if something goes awry with this beer. I'd like to know when and possibly pin down why. I don't want to wait 2-3 weeks excited about another beer and finally sample it and have it taste terrible. My other bad batches tasted bad right out of the fermenter and as I said they got worse with time in bottles. So far so good with this one.
Any experienced suggestions about things to look for visually or note in terms of changing taste (negative changes that is) as I observe this beer over the next couple weeks? Signs that something is going bad and why? (Yes I'm paranoid something gonna turn on me). Thanks for the help.
As i've posted before, i had a great first run at homebrewing then it went to hell in a handbasket. My next 4 batches tasted like total crap. two were dumped. Since then I have replaced bucket fermenter with 6 gal better bottle and replaced my tubing. I recently crossed my fingers and got busy brewing a porter kit from Midwest with a liquid yeast vs. Munton's dry which I was using. I studied every aspect of my process and found two MAJOR potential culprits that i can't believe i didn't see:
1. In my old bucket fermenter, I had a Better Bottle pail adapter and simple-flo valve. When I cleaned and sanitized the bucket I never took any of that stuff apart. I soaked in PBW and Star-San'd. Turns out when I really looked in the inside the pail adapter/valve there was some caked-on trub or something that very likely was contributing to the nastiness of my beer. Don't know how long it had been there.
2. When I hooked up my wort chiller i found a very subtle leak that was flowing down the input side and making it's way down to the bottom of the coil. You really couldn't see it unless you held the chiller up. My tubing obviously was not tightly fitted to the chiller and I don't know when it got loose like that. Obvious problem being that I had water from outside running through a garden hose through a copper tubing into my chilled wort! Probably not a great thing for my beer. (I didn't use this chiller with my first batch, the only one that turned out good. I think that says something)
All that said, I'm hoping I've gotten back on track with this Porter. I took a sample after 4 days just to see how things were progressing and it was awesome. I'm going to take regular samples during fermentation to see if something goes awry with this beer. I'd like to know when and possibly pin down why. I don't want to wait 2-3 weeks excited about another beer and finally sample it and have it taste terrible. My other bad batches tasted bad right out of the fermenter and as I said they got worse with time in bottles. So far so good with this one.
Any experienced suggestions about things to look for visually or note in terms of changing taste (negative changes that is) as I observe this beer over the next couple weeks? Signs that something is going bad and why? (Yes I'm paranoid something gonna turn on me). Thanks for the help.
