Hydrophobins

[user 302147]

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to prevent the fungus that causes hydrophobins from infecting my beer? I've lost two batches to it in the past three months.

 

[marc1]

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to prevent the fungus that causes hydrophobins from infecting my beer? I've lost two batches to it in the past three months.

Clean and then sanitize everything that will touch the wort/beer once it is cool. Disassemble all spigots for cleaning and sanitizing. Discard any old plastic.

More specific information about your process can yield more specific recommendations.

 

[Kickass]

Hydroponics? That’s the other forum.

I had to look up hydrophobins. In 15 years of brewing I’m not aware of encountering them, maybe I did but didn’t realize it.

Are you sure you’ve properly diagnosed your issue?

How are these hydrophobins manifesting themselves?

Do you have pictures?

 

[hotbeer]

How did you identify the culprit as hydrophins. Other things might visually look similar on your beer.

If you've been normally using star-san, iodophor or other common sanitizer, then first give everything a good soak in a chlorine bleach solution for 10 - 15 minutes. Bottles and/or kegs too.

Thanks for mentioning it. I never seen them mentioned. Now I have another possibility for why I had gushers in random bottles a few months ago. Bleach seems to have cured the issue. Or perhaps it was just incidental to it curing itself.

 

[user 302147]

I had bottles foaming over when I opened them so I googled the cause and hydrophobins is what came up in the results. I'll try the bleach solution and report back.
If it happens again I'll get some pics too.

 

[marc1]

I had bottles foaming over when I opened them so I googled the cause and hydrophobins is what came up in the results. I'll try the bleach solution and report back.
If it happens again I'll get some pics too.

Foaming bottles could be many things, from infection with bacteria or wild yeast, to incorrect priming sugar amounts, to unfinished fermentation.

 

[Gilbert Spinning Horse]

Was it all the bottles or just some?

 

[hotbeer]

I'll try the bleach solution and report back.
If it happens again I'll get some pics too.

Remember, that's the solution for the next batch. Not the current batch. Just like injecting it for COVID, we don't want to ingest Clorox in any significant amounts.




You might take a SG reading of some of your gusher bottles and compare that to the SG of other bottles of the same batch that seem okay and also compare to your FG before bottling.

My bottles that were gushers went all the way down to an SG of 1.002 - 1.000. The FG of their batches were 1.010 and 1.012. Should have also checked the SG of the good bottles of those same batches, but I didn't think of that at the time.

 

[Bad DNA]

Hydroponics? That’s the other forum.

I had to look up hydrophobins. In 15 years of brewing I’m not aware of encountering them, maybe I did but didn’t realize it.

Are you sure you’ve properly diagnosed your issue?

How are these hydrophobins manifesting themselves?

Do you have pictures?

They're very similar to midi-chlorians, the source of the Force, or prions that cause mad-human disease. Hydrophobins, like prions, are proteins theorized to corrupt good proteins to the bad side, perhaps making brews into foaming terrors. These proteins are able to assemble spontaneously into amphipathic monolayers at hydrophobic–hydrophilic interfaces. (Only two small bits of this silliness is true -- and likely has little to do with our victim's experience.)

How the OP knew hydrophobins were the cause without a protein assay (and not, perhaps, an overindulgence in priming sugar) is a mystery. But there are many mysteries in our universe.