ShareBrewing
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- Joined
- Aug 23, 2016
- Messages
- 274
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What about the kombucha? After all it's a mix of some pretty funky bacteria and fungi (including yeast)... and you only have it covered with a shirt/clothe. It's the same concept as having different fermentation chambers/spaces for your Brett/sour beers and your clean ones. As a sour brewer I have been battling this issue since I've started. I have a moderate one-bedroom apartment that has carpet and all kinds of clothe-like material that the funky Brett ingrained itself in, not to mention all my clothes as my more than half dozen sours ferment together in my bedroom closet. It's just IN THE AIR, dude.
All the flavors and smells that you describe are directly in line with those compounds found naturally in kombucha. Given that beer is a different environment than kombucha, obviously this is why the bugs are taking off and souring your beer so fast, there's simply more nutrients for the bugs to feed on.
Because you're brewing and storing your equipment in the same closed air space as your kombucha, you're just contaminating everything at all times. It doesn't matter how much you obsess about cleaning if any air from your house/basement can get into the carboy and then your batch is contaminated.
This is why I simply stopped brewing and bottling at my apartment entirely. I go to my parents to brew and ferment ALL of my clean beers and haven't had an infection since. When you stopped having the infections, was the kombucha bottled up already or still present? If it was fermenting alongside all your infected batches, it'd be the culprit. I've NEVER heard of a beer forming those kind of funky sour acids THAT fast.
All the flavors and smells that you describe are directly in line with those compounds found naturally in kombucha. Given that beer is a different environment than kombucha, obviously this is why the bugs are taking off and souring your beer so fast, there's simply more nutrients for the bugs to feed on.
Because you're brewing and storing your equipment in the same closed air space as your kombucha, you're just contaminating everything at all times. It doesn't matter how much you obsess about cleaning if any air from your house/basement can get into the carboy and then your batch is contaminated.
This is why I simply stopped brewing and bottling at my apartment entirely. I go to my parents to brew and ferment ALL of my clean beers and haven't had an infection since. When you stopped having the infections, was the kombucha bottled up already or still present? If it was fermenting alongside all your infected batches, it'd be the culprit. I've NEVER heard of a beer forming those kind of funky sour acids THAT fast.
