Contaminated...but with what? And can I do anything about it?

[jacksnsixes]

So...I know I know I know it's "REALLY HARD TO CONTAMINATE YOUR BEER", but I've managed to find myself in a building with mold problems, and of the 35 gallons currently in secondary fermentation, at least 15 are contaminated with some type of mold...

It's awful, actually. This happened earlier in the summer to 2 batches in a row, so we took a break, bought new equipment, replaced all hoses, plastic spoons, etc., soaked all fermentors in bleach/water solutions, and act like OCD crazy people when it comes to sanitizing everything on brew day. And yet...the contamination is back.

I feel depressed and naseous seeing this happen to my beer. SO, I'm asking for help, advice, and suggestions.

First of all:
Can anyone identify what exactly this stuff is? When it first appears (usually 10-15 days into fermentation, though it appeared in primary once as well) it appears as just a sheen on the surface, but within a day it becomes a skin, and then starts to develop large, slimy bubbles. There's a powdery texture covering it all, which is why I'm convinced it's some type of mold, but wonder if anyone has seen this before and knows what it is.

Second: What can be done? One of the beers affected with this stuff is a porter, and it still tastes pretty ****ing great - any way to salvage it?

Any way to prevent this from happening in the future? Losing a batch is an awful tragedy to endure, but at this point I have batches of beer dropping like flies. Help!!

 

[eastoak]

brett infection?

 

[ReverseApacheMaster]

From the look and your description it sounds like more than just one infection. It looks/sounds like lacto and multiple brett strains. I don't think it's mold because those pictures look like typical non-mold beer infections.

I think part of your problem is that you are using bleach as a sanitizer. Stop that. Use a real sanitizer.

However, if you are getting infections that badly that quickly you are either passing wort through very infected equipment or your equipment is extremely infected. If your equipment is poorly sanitized it's possible the infection is reoccurring from the carboys and racking equipment. However, I suspect there is a piece of equipment (like a wort chiller) that hasn't been replaced and hasn't been properly cleaned and sanitized that is infecting your beer.

Your first step will be to get a no-rinse sanitizer and use it on EVERY piece of equipment you have. All of them. Hoses, racking canes, airlocks, wort chiller, carboy stoppers, carboys, buckets, siphons, bottling buckets, spigots. Everything.

You can't undo an infection in a beer but if it tastes good you can let it ride out until it becomes stable (which may take 6-12 months or more) and then bottle as usual.

 

[jaycount]

I would probably toss out every plastic piece of equipment that has touched the infected wort.

And yeah, get a real no rinse sanitizer.

 

[bluemoose]

Star-sans. Get it use it.

 

[jacksnsixes]

We have and use Star-san on everything. However, we also soaked our fermentors in bleach water overnight prior to brew day, just to be sure. Our sanitation practices are sound. I brewed 11 batches prior to the infections starting with no problems at all, and when we had those batches get infected in the early summer, I thought the same as many of you, and replaced all my non-glass equipment.

We have replaced literally ALL of the equipment we were using a few months ago when this gunk first cropped up - buckets, spoons, fermenters, hoses, chillers...everything.But since we've started brewing again, our FIRST batch had the same infection.

I'll look into what a Brett infection is though and see if I can find more info. Thanks for the tip.

When you say "ride out the infection" for 6-12 months - do you mean that the infection will eventually just run out of steam and disappear? That would be fantastic. I have no qualms about setting our fermenters aside for a while to see if the stuff goes away. Sure as hell not going to do any more brewing until we figure out what's happening here.

I'll do a little more reading about that as well.

Thanks again to all who were helpful.

 

[broadbill]

You can't undo an infection in a beer but if it tastes good you can let it ride out until it becomes stable (which may take 6-12 months or more) and then bottle as usual.

If a beer still tastes good (or like it should taste), it isn't infected.

 

[broadbill]

When you say "ride out the infection" for 6-12 months - do you mean that the infection will eventually just run out of steam and disappear? That would be fantastic. I have no qualms about setting our fermenters aside for a while to see if the stuff goes away. Sure as hell not going to do any more brewing until we figure out what's happening here.

If it is truly infected, than it might burn itself out, but it isn't going to disapper. If it is truly infected then there are going to be off-flavors, probably bad ones.

 

[bluemoose]

Are you using something abrasive to clean your fermenters and equipment? Possible scratches teaming with nasties? I use a soft sponge and water pressure to clean mine. Scrubby pads are bad!

Are you doing full boils or partials? If partials, are you boiling the additional water? Could it be in the water?
Have you been using the same bottle of starsans? Hard to believe it could be contaminated.
Do you siphon from the boil pot or pour into the fermenter?
Are you using air lock or blowoff?
Using carboy or buckets?
Replaced the rubber oring that the air lock or blowoff goes into?
How about an indepth description of your process?

 

[bierhaus15]

That doesn't look like Brett to me. What is your process for cooling the wort - Do you chill it uncovered or covered, water bath or immersion chiller? I a large number of infections can be traced back to poor sanitation while cooling. Lastly, what type of fermenting vessels are you using and how long are you keeping the beer in primary, ect...

Most infections do not improve over time. If you are really that hard up for beer, drink it fast.

 

[ReverseApacheMaster]

I'll look into what a Brett infection is though and see if I can find more info. Thanks for the tip.

When you say "ride out the infection" for 6-12 months - do you mean that the infection will eventually just run out of steam and disappear? That would be fantastic. I have no qualms about setting our fermenters aside for a while to see if the stuff goes away. Sure as hell not going to do any more brewing until we figure out what's happening here.

Eventually the beer will run out of sugars fermentable to anything in it and just like regular yeast, whatever you have will give up and go to sleep in the bottom. Then the beer will be stable and you can bottle or keg it. The problem with infections is if you don't wait until it runs out of fermentable sugars and you bottle it then it will keep making CO2 and building up pressure until the bottles start to blow up. Very bad situation.


One other thing I thought of -- where are your sourcing yeast for your beers? Are you buying new yeast each time or are you repitching on cakes or washing yeast? If you are sharing yeast across batches then the infection is probably moving along with it.

 

[rockfish42]

Try taking apart the ball valve on your kettle, often there will be gunk built up in it and at least in my system it doesn't get hot enough to sanitize the inside.

 

[broadbill]

Eventually the beer will run out of sugars fermentable to anything in it and just like regular yeast, whatever you have will give up and go to sleep in the bottom. Then the beer will be stable and you can bottle or keg it.

I don't get it. Infections are bad because they throw off-flavors. Why keep it once it becomes "stable"? And if there isn't off-flavors present, is it really infected?

I know everyone on here likes the "wait a while and see if it gets better" strategy, but it is really infected it ain't going to get better.

 

[jacksnsixes]

Are you using something abrasive to clean your fermenters and equipment? Possible scratches teaming with nasties? I use a soft sponge and water pressure to clean mine. Scrubby pads are bad!

Are you doing full boils or partials? If partials, are you boiling the additional water? Could it be in the water?
Have you been using the same bottle of starsans? Hard to believe it could be contaminated.
Do you siphon from the boil pot or pour into the fermenter?
Are you using air lock or blowoff?
Using carboy or buckets?
Replaced the rubber oring that the air lock or blowoff goes into?
How about an indepth description of your process?

We use sponges or plastic pads for cleaning fermentors and equipment, and all of our equipment was brand new when we got this latest infection. But we'll stop using scrubby pads anyway, even the plastic ones.

We've been doing partial boils and adding bottled water - theoretically pure and sanitary, but I'm convinced now that that has to be where the infection is coming from - I'm pretty sure everything else about our sanitizing and brewing practices eliminates the possibility of contamination. It has to be in the air or in the water.

We use airlocks; never tried a blowoff setup.
We have 2 glass carboys and 1 plastic bucket for primary, glass carboys for secondary. Infections have occured in beer which went through primary in plastic AND in glass.

Our process:
We start by washing all our equipment (airlocks, hoses, buckets, spoons, etc. etc.) and then we toss everything into a big tub of star-san, and take things out to use as we need them. Things we use repeatedly during the brewing day are washed and dunked in the star-san prior to touching anything that's not boiling or going to be boiled.

We only do partial mash brews, so we bring our water up to temp (68C) and add our grains for the mash, keep it there for an hour, and then remove the grains and sparge with hot water.
We bring the water to a boil, remove from heat, add extract, bring back to a boil, then start the hop schedule.

15 minutes before the end of the boil, we rinse our immersion chiller (homemade from copper tubing) in star-san and immerse it in the wort to sterilize it. When the boil ends, we turn on the cold water to run through our chiller, draining into the kitchen sink (I know, wasteful...).

Cooling usually takes between 25 and 35 minutes to come down to temperature. With our chiller in the pot, we can't put our lid on, so the wort is exposed to air during that time.

Once cool, we siphon from the brewpot into the fermentor (which has just been rinsed in star-san thoroughly, pitch our yeast, and aerate by stirring vigorously with a big spoon that has holes in it for 3-4 minutes. We then take the fermentor lid (for the bucket) out of the star-san, take the airlock out of the star-san and fill it to the line with star-san, pop it on the top, and then tuck the bucket in a dark corner.

We've used yeast from past healthy batches of beer, but after getting contaminations decided we should just start over and ordered new, fresh yeast, but still have the same contamination issue, so we're pretty certain it's not the yeasties giving us the trouble.

We're going to brew again next wednesday, and we'll do a full boil and see if that solves our problem.

Thanks to everyone for advice and support. Losing a batch of beer is heartbreaking, but losing several in a row has made me feel like quitting brewing altogether. Hopefully our problem is that the supposedly clean water we've been using is contaminated, and a full boil solves our problem.

Thanks~

 

[jacksnsixes]

I know everyone on here likes the "wait a while and see if it gets better" strategy, but it is really infected it ain't going to get better.

D'OH! I think we all just love our beer to much to have to dump it down the toilet...

 

[jacksnsixes]

Try taking apart the ball valve on your kettle, often there will be gunk built up in it and at least in my system it doesn't get hot enough to sanitize the inside.

I'll do that. Because of the problems we've been having, we started immersing our boil pot in star-san prior to beginning the brew, and opening and closing the ball valve there to run sanitizer through it prior to the boil, just in case it doesn't get hot enough to sanitize the inside during the boil. Last week though we just decided to not even risk it, and siphoned into the fermentor. This gunk that shows up though usually doesn't appear until about 10-15 days into fermentation, so hard to say whether we're in the clear or not.

Thanks for the tip. Will clean that sucker out.

 

[jacksnsixes]

Eventually the beer will run out of sugars fermentable to anything in it and just like regular yeast, whatever you have will give up and go to sleep in the bottom. Then the beer will be stable and you can bottle or keg it. The problem with infections is if you don't wait until it runs out of fermentable sugars and you bottle it then it will keep making CO2 and building up pressure until the bottles start to blow up. Very bad situation.

Good to know. So that's the reason for the long lag time - do I need to wait for the gravity to be all the way down to like 1.004 or something, or can I just wait til it's at normal 1.015-17 range?

One other thing I thought of -- where are your sourcing yeast for your beers? Are you buying new yeast each time or are you repitching on cakes or washing yeast? If you are sharing yeast across batches then the infection is probably moving along with it.

Good point. i thought it was the yeast before as well. I'd been washing yeast and using the same yeast for batches for about a year and never had any problems, so when we these infection issues first cropped up, I tossed out all the yeast and bought new yeast, but still had contamination in the next batch. Very frustrating.

 

[shafferpilot]

Bottled water is most definitely NOT theoretically sanitized. Still, it usually won't cause a problem like this. Are you soaking the water bottles with Starsan? How about the yeast packs before cutting them open? What else is contacting your wort/beer that wasn't replaced when you threw all the plastic away? And lastly, is wherever you are brewing/fermenting dirty at all? Just using a super dusty basement pretty much undoes all the sanitizing effort every time the furnace kicks on.

 

[comer88888]

this thread might help
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/post-your-infection-71400/

 

[bluemoose]

You can still do a partial boil, just boil the fresh water in another pot before hand and cool.

Have you tried running water through your chiller without it sitting in the beer? I would be curious to see if you had a pinhole leak that might be adding some dirty water to your beer when the chiller is under pressure.

Pop the airlock bung out of the cover when you sanitize.

I would guess it is a water issue. Everything else in your process looks pretty good. Ad yes, even the plastic scrubbies can put tiny scratches in the plastic surfaces.

Good luck!

 

[broadbill]

D'OH! I think we all just love our beer to much to have to dump it down the toilet...

Sometimes the truth hurts. It amazes me how many people are willing to choke down 5 gallons of infected beer.

Some off-flavors will mellow with age....off-flavors from infections aren't one of them.

 

[broadbill]

Good to know. So that's the reason for the long lag time - do I need to wait for the gravity to be all the way down to like 1.004 or something, or can I just wait til it's at normal 1.015-17 range?

I'd taste it before bottling and decide if it is something you'd want to drink before bottling. If you really have an infection, chances are you won't want to drink it.

ReverseApacheMaster is correct that the infection will process all the sugars and stall out when none are left (just like yeast), but what he/she doesn't mention is all of the off-flavors that will go along with that process. I don't think it is going to be a product that you'll want to be drinking.

Sometimes you just need to cut your losses and move on.

 

[JRems]

It was stated earlier but take apart your ball valve and clean or replace it. Even if you ran sanitizer thru it and soaked it it can just sanitize the surface, if you have debris gunking up in there it can't sanitize that.

 

[Hugh_Jass]

I dont know, broadbill. I'd love to have that pellicile right now. I pitched some lacto on a perfectly good belgian blonde a week ago. It still hasn't developed any visible signs that the lacto is working.

Yes, lacto, brett, pedio...will give different flavors. They're definitely different than Sacc., but someone's "off" flavors is another's tremendous flavors. The OP may or may not like them, but since the beer already has the bugs working, he might as well let it ride and have a taste when it's complete.

OP: Re: when to bottle - It's ok to bottle when the beer has reached terminal gravity. That may be 1.010 or 1.000. Bottle it when the beer has consistent hydrometer readings over a few weeks. (remember these bugs work slower than sacc, so the readings should be done over an extended time frame)

 

[Rip]

We start by washing all our equipment (airlocks, hoses, buckets, spoons, etc. etc.) and then we toss everything into a big tub of star-san, and take things out to use as we need them. Things we use repeatedly during the brewing day are washed and dunked in the star-san prior to touching anything that's not boiling or going to be boiled.

Star-san & Chlorine, these are good things... but where's the SOAP?
If you're 'washing' your equipment with a sponge, that's probably bad enough right there.. but if you're not using a good surfactant during that 'washing', your just introducing loads of bacteria and other organic matter that may harbor the source or sources of infection. Little-itty-bitty bits of matter will act like life rafts for the bad guys (they hide on the inside of any particles that may come off your sponge in this case) and Star-san or even Chlorine won't fix that... thus the need for a surfactant, which will break-up the itty-bitty bits and allow your sanitizer of your choice to then do it's job.

/End PSA.


- M

 

[superslomo]

I thought it was a big no-no to use detergents. I use PBW and have found it to be "so far so good", but am no hardened professional about this. I have had issues with contamination, but it was in bottling.

Scrubbies are a pretty bad idea, I think according to most opinions. Also helps to rinse as soon as possible after finishing the batch, I tend to use the garden hose on a concentrated blast, then rub out as much as possible, then PBW for a soak, and then starsan to sanitize before starting a new batch.

Again, what do I know?

 

[daksin]

Have you tried running water through your chiller without it sitting in the beer? I would be curious to see if you had a pinhole leak that might be adding some dirty water to your beer when the chiller is under pressure.

Definitely a good idea to check your chiller. If there's something in your tap water, faucet, or growing inside the chiller itself (more likely) this could be a major contributor.

I've never had a problem topping off with bottled water and I don't even sanitize the outside of the jugs first, but it's something worth checking out. See if you can replicate your infection by making a "starter" and adding your top off water to the sterile wort.

It definitely looks like you have multiple different infections though, a mold and then a brett/lacto something or other.

Good luck- I know how infuriating finding the source of an infection can be. Never had one in the beer brewing process, but I've been managing labs long enough to have pulled a few pounds of hair out chasing phage, mold, and yeast contaminations to hell and back .

 

[kpfeif]

Cooling usually takes between 25 and 35 minutes to come down to temperature. With our chiller in the pot, we can't put our lid on, so the wort is exposed to air during that time.

35 minutes would be plenty of time for the mold that your house is infected with to drop into your wort. Try getting a roll of wide aluminum foil, sanitizing it, and putting it over the kettle while you cool the wort. Between that, new yeast, and cleaning out the ball valve, I would bet you'll be in the gravy.

 

[jacksnsixes]

Have you tried running water through your chiller without it sitting in the beer? I would be curious to see if you had a pinhole leak that might be adding some dirty water to your beer when the chiller is under pressure.

Good idea - we'll definitely do this prior to our next brew. Thanks for the tip

 

[jacksnsixes]

Star-san & Chlorine, these are good things... but where's the SOAP?

- M

Yes, we're using ordinary dishsoap to wash everything prior to sanitizing. That's why I said "wash" not "rinse".

 

[jacksnsixes]

35 minutes would be plenty of time for the mold that your house is infected with to drop into your wort. Try getting a roll of wide aluminum foil, sanitizing it, and putting it over the kettle while you cool the wort. Between that, new yeast, and cleaning out the ball valve, I would bet you'll be in the gravy.

Good idea with the foil! Will do that next time we're chilling