Not happy

[skydvr74]

Recently my company had a team building event at a brew on premises establishment. Somewhere in their bottling setup they had an infection. 90 gallons of beer was infected. I personally dumped close to 20 gallons of beer. I thought I could sanitize the bottles and reuse them. I was wrong. After ten years of brewing I now have had my first infection in my equipment. The infection spread from using the sanitizing solution to first sanitize the bottle and then my bottling bucket. From there it spread to my auto siphon and to my primary carboys. I am now looking to replace half of my equipment and dump 15 gallons of beer.

 

[ifearnothing0]

Damn bro that's a damn shame , I was super upset having to dump a 5 gallon batch , especially after how nice the fermentation was going in the carboy .... Sorry for your loss bro

 

[Zamial]

What are you using for sanitizer?

 

[uncommonsense]

Sewer water?

 

[Frige]

Wow that is scary. A friend of mines daughter got a staff infection that was resistant to antibiotics and almost died. I hope that we are not going to start seeing this kind of thing more often. Kill it with fire!

 

[phenry]

Eh, it happens. It took me a couple of batches to figure out there was some microbe hanging out somewhere in my bottling equipment. I use Star San on every single surface the beer touches and occasionally bleach my equipment (you know, to throw a curve ball to anything that might be growing resistant to the acid sanitizer), but whatever this was ruined about 18 gallons for me. I just went ahead tossed a bunch of my primary buckets and auto-siphon too. That whole deal set me back a couple of batches money-wise, but I'd rather not drink beer at all than have to force myself to drink spoiled beer.

 

[skydvr74]

@ uncommonsense. I think sewer water would have been an upgrade.

I use starsan and as I mentioned have never had a problem before. This one was the perfect storm of bad luck/complacency/poor technique on my part. I am kicking myself for that. I was gearing up for the holiday season and brewed 4 batches in 4 weeks; two 10 gallon and two 5 gallon batches. When I am brewing heavily, I usually will save my starsan solution for 2-3 brew sessions before swapping it out. This time I stretched it a little further than normal – big mistake. On my second 10 gallon batch, an IPA, I split it into 3 secondary carboys for dry hopping. This is when things started to turn bad. When bottling this third batch I was running out of bottles and decided to use some of the bottles from the brew on premises beer. As I mentioned I had about 100 of these bottles that I had received from coworkers. They were the last bottles immersed into the starsan solution on this day of bottling. As a side note, I used bottles from this group in an earlier brew session with no problems. They had been thoroughly washed and sanitized, or so I thought. Now everything that was sanitized prior to the infected bottles was/is fine, but everything after that is not. I bottled a second batch two weeks ago and I sampled that last night. It is also starting to turn. My final frustration was contaminating my primary while taking a hydro sample. Everything looked great while taking the sample, but I used the contaminated starsan to sanitize the thief. I went to transfer the beer last weekend and found a nice pellicle on the top of my beer.

So now it’s time to replace my lines, replace my buckets, the old starsan was gone a while ago, then wash and sanitize everything else like crazy. Unfortunately, this means reduced inventory for the holiday season and I will ramp up more slowly (1 batch per month) until I am sure I have eradicated this bug from my setup.

Hopefully Santa will bring me some new equipment in a few weeks.