Humbled by my porter

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Walker

I use secondaries. :p
HBT Supporter
Joined
Sep 8, 2005
Messages
10,982
Reaction score
122
Location
Cary
Seven long years I have brewed my own beer. Countless batches cooked, cooled, fermented, bottled, and shared. (ok, it's not countless... I have anal records of each batch on my computer.)

Anyway, it took me a little over a hundred batches, but I finally got an infection in the brew I cooked up this weekend. I know exactly what caused it, and I am kicking myself for not correcting what I knew was risky.

After two days of suspected infection and several "don't-worry-have-a" beers, I opened the fermenter to take a sample and check the gravity of what I considered to be my most exciting batch in progress.

... VINEGAR ...

Nice and dark, and I can taste the lactose-sweetness and caramel flavors that I wanted in there, but there's that dry bite and vinegar flavor lying there to mock me.

I am surprised at how truely upset I am at this. I knew it could happen to me, but it never had, so ... I am now humbled.

Bah!

Oh well. Every cloud has a silver lining, right? To honor this noble beer that failed, I popped open the first bottle of brown ale that I brewed last month. My first homebrew since moving across country.

And it is good. At least I have that... and no bacteria can take it away from me.

-walker
 
LupusUmbrus said:
Just what was this "what I knew was risky"?

Being a minimalist of sorts, I do not have a wort chiller. I take 2 gallons of my bottled water and pour it into 1-gallon ziplocks early on brew day and shove it in the freezer. I then use this ice to cool my stew down to pitching temps. Works great. I've been doing this ever since I started brewing.

On this occasion, I got the bags into the freezer a little later than normal so it never actually froze, but it got plenty cold.

Anyway, one of the bags got a small hole in it and started leaking a little. SWMBO noticed this while I was boiling and pulled the bag out of the freezer to prevent a huge mess. This caused the small hole to become a much bigger hole (the bag was frozen to the freezer due to the leaking water.) In an attempt to save the necessary cold water, she threw the bag into one of our cooking pots, where it proceeded to leak out. The pot was clean, but not sanitized. The outside of the bag was not clean by any stretch of the imagination. This left me with a non-sterilized pot filled with 1 gallon of water with a non-sterilized plastic bag floating in it.

I should have boiled this or tossed it out or something. The one thing I should NOT have done was go ahead and put this into the fermenter as-is. But... I did do that and now I have 5 gallons of vinegar porter.

Why did I do it? I will never know.

Will I do it again? Absolutely not.

In fact, I am no longer going to use ice to cool anymore. I will just use very COLD water, which I can simply dump out of jugs into the fermenter and not have to mess with the plastic bags again.

-walker
 
Walker said:
Seven long years I have brewed my own beer. Countless batches cooked, cooled, fermented, bottled, and shared. (ok, it's not countless... I have anal records of each batch on my computer.)

Anyway, it took me a little over a hundred batches, but I finally got an infection in the brew I cooked up this weekend. I know exactly what caused it, and I am kicking myself for not correcting what I knew was risky.

After two days of suspected infection and several "don't-worry-have-a" beers, I opened the fermenter to take a sample and check the gravity of what I considered to be my most exciting batch in progress.

... VINEGAR ...

Nice and dark, and I can taste the lactose-sweetness and caramel flavors that I wanted in there, but there's that dry bite and vinegar flavor lying there to mock me.

I am surprised at how truely upset I am at this. I knew it could happen to me, but it never had, so ... I am now humbled.

Bah!

Oh well. Every cloud has a silver lining, right? To honor this noble beer that failed, I popped open the first bottle of brown ale that I brewed last month. My first homebrew since moving across country.

And it is good. At least I have that... and no bacteria can take it away from me.

-walker


I know how you feal,I did a light ale for friends that don't care for my better homebrew.One bach of bottels did not get a good cleaning and thus spoiled a case of not too bad brew. :eek: Very bad astringant taste hits the pallett wright a way yuck!Dumped it all! felkt like **** doing it and knew what i had done wrong.I did leared something as I'm sure you did too! :D At least your Brown Ale is drinkable.. :cool:
 
Walker said:
In fact, I am no longer going to use ice to cool anymore. I will just use very COLD water, which I can simply dump out of jugs into the fermenter and not have to mess with the plastic bags again.

-walker

I thought the idea of buying a 7lb bag of ice and using it to cool your wort sounded like a pretty worthy idea. The ice factories typically use clean water so as to not leave a funky taste in one's beverage.

Just for giggles, I took a look at the website of our local "bag of ice" provider:

http://www.jeffersonice.com/fun-forgotten-food.html

Sounds pretty beer-friendly.
 
Walker said:
Nice and dark, and I can taste the lactose-sweetness and caramel flavors that I wanted in there, but there's that dry bite and vinegar flavor lying there to mock me.

Let it finish fermenting. Take about 19 oz. of the beer-vinegar and heat it to 160 for 15 minutes to sterilize it. Cool it and add it to a stout when you bottle (or keg). Voila! Guinness!
 
Off to the LHBS to rebuy the ingredients for this batch. If it doesn't work out this time, I'll assume the recipe is haunted.

-walker
 
egads!

i don't know what the hell was wrong with us the first time we tasted this, but there is most DEFINATELY not any vinegar in it. wtf?

it's tastey... and that's good b/c I just bought the stuff to make a second batch!

-walker
 
It is human nature to push the limits and take risks. I have brewed my share of bad brews, wether it be sanitation or recipe, and chalk it up in the end as paying my dues. Now that my dues are well paid up, I can enjoy my return on investment.
 
Good to hear all is not lost :)

Do you think the vinegar taste was perhaps yeast nutrient type chemicals? I know that yeast produce a number of different compounds that they eat up later, or age out of the beer. Ohh, the speculation ;)
 
i think it might have beeb part yeast and part chlorine (from cleaning things, but not rinsing well).

Plus, I have a bit of a cold, so might have misinterpreted things completely.

-walker
 
Back
Top