Failed Experiments

If you have been following this blog at all, you will remember that back in 2010, I built the mother of all fermentation chambers.  After using this for two years and having reasonable success with it, I have decommissioned it, broke it down and hauled it out to the trash heap.  There are a couple of issues with that assembly that I just couldn’t overcome.  First, I had experienced a couple of fermentations that had clogged the airlock and blown yeast slurry allover the inside of the cabinet.  Despite my efforts to clean up the mess, there were just so many little specs of goo everywhere that it inevitably started to mold.  Having a moldy environment makes the challenge of keeping contaminants out of your yeast and fermenting beer even more daunting.  Second, using an air conditioning window unit sounds simple enough, I was even able to figure out a simple temperature probe bypass to attain cooler temperatures than your normal air conditioned room, like 65 degrees.  My desire to try fermenting a lager turned into a nightmare when the A/C unit froze the coils a number of times.  Add to this disappointment that the insulation between the “sealed” panels was starting to grow mold and turn the wood paneling black from the inside and it was clear.  This was an experiment that may work fine in less-humid environments, but this was clearly not going to work for me anymore.

A couple of days casually looking at Craig’s List and a solution was discovered.  I found a reasonably-new Whirlpool refrigerator that someone was selling cheap (like $60 cheap).  It is getting harder to find a ‘fridge that is not a side-by-side and I needed one with the freezer on top.  Found it, picked it up, cleaned it out and stuck a temperature probe in it.  My wife is still confused as to why I wanted a refrigerator that is set at 65 degrees, but if you are reading this, I’m sure you know why.  The one remaining piece of the old fermentation chamber is the shelf on the bottom of this new one.  After some sanding and a new coat of sealer, it’s good as new.  I’m using it right now to ferment a couple of ales that I brewed last weekend.  This leads me to my second failed experiment.

I am very enamored with the Fullers line of ales.  If you live near London, this may seem very odd and silly, but here in “the colonies” the products we get from the Fuller’s brewery are a bit old and oxidized.  Apparently a cargo container and the Atlantic Ocean are not favorable to beer,  who knew?  So, in typical home-brewer style*, I proceeded to try and clone some of these ales.  Also, in my typical style, I try and go the full 9 yards with the processes.  I was going to brew these beers the same way they do at Fullers and use a parti-gyle system.  The linked article is long on description and short on practical application.  Being new to this process, I assumed that I would take the grist from beer A and combine that with beer B to make a Master Grist.  Then take the first 6 gallons of running in one kettle and the second 6 gallons in another.  Easy, right?  Of course it is, which is why it is all wrong.  So, off I go milling and mashing 2 brews worth of grain and running the resulting wort into kettle A.  Great, after about 7.5 gallons are in the kettle, I switch to kettle B and continue on draining.  Perfect!  Start the boil and add some hops, right?  Boil for 50 minutes and add the second set of hops.  Both kettles are on the same schedule, what could be easier?  What?  You’re saying I missed step?

As it turns out, a big step was missed.  I take a hydrometer reading from kettle A and whoa! 1.098 SG?  This can’t be right.  Take a hydrometer reading from kettle B and I get 1.034.  It was about this time that I realized that I didn’t take a pre-boil hydrometer reading which would have prevented the catastrophe I was now in the middle of.  I stop draining kettle A into the first carboy (1) and start adding it to carboy 2 after about 2/3rds of the wort was drained.  Then I blended the worts 2/3rd and 1/3rd to lower the gravity of kettle A and raise the gravity of kettle B.  Now my hops and bittering was going to be all screwy but what could I do at this point other than throw them both out and start over.  At roughly half a sack of Maris Otter I was not dumping this down the driveway.  The correct way to do this is to drain the first runnings (what I had put into kettle A) into a separate container and blend them into the second runnings to get the appropriate gravity.  Now, what was supposed to be an ESB clone (SG of 1.058) was at a post blend gravity of 1.082, nearly Barley wine strength and what was supposed to be London pride (SG 1.048) was at 1.056.

Over the past week, I’ve found a couple of parti-gyle calculators, with Tom’s from the Antioch Sud Suckers being my personal favorite.  I used way too much grain and didn’t blend them before starting the boil.  Other than that these brews fermented just fine, both achieving their original, calculated terminal gravity.  I plan to dry hop them both since the London Pride is closer to the ESB and the ESB is way under hopped.

Cleaning and Sanitizing a Brewery

As I mentioned in a post on Facebook, cleaning seemed to me to be self-explanatory and a “non-topic”.  Anyone who has ever made their way around a kitchen, or as I have, worked in a retail food establishment, should know how to clean food preparation equipment.  A simple detergent that is biodegradable (because most of it gets dumped on the ground when you’re done) and a Scotch-Brite pad.  Use warm water and scrub away the gunk, right? 

As it turn out, no.  It’s not that simple.  Brewery soil is a different concoction of organics with a low pH (meaning mildly acidic).  Think about all the different sugar compounds created, maltose, dextrose, sucrose, etc. and then boiling that with hops which are for all intents green flowers.  The mess that gets created gets into everything.  If you don’t clean at all, you’ll end up with a mold experiment so it’s easy to realize that stuff needs to be washed off.  I’ve read many suggestions like using hot Oxiclean or other kitchen type cleanser to let everything soak, and then come back and scrub it.  I have always had on hand a container of Powder Brewery Wash (PBW) from Five Star, but compared to something like Oxiclean, PBW is expensive so I only used it when stuff wasn’t coming clean with other products.  I used this method for the first ten years of my brewing hobby.

“Why cleaning matters” is a page on the Five Star Chemical page for home brewers and for me I understood that you cannot sanitize something that isn’t clean.  Dirt harbors bacteria so if the dirt isn’t removed, a surface cannot be sanitized.  I think we all know what “clean” means, but what does “sanitized” mean?  We’ve all heard words like “disinfect”, “sterilize” and “sanitize” but what do they really mean?  These three words form a progression of remaining bacterial infection.  Something that has been sterilized has had all micro-organisms –harmful or not, and their spores killed on a surface.  Something that has been disinfected has had all harmful micro-organisms and their spores killed on a surface.  Something that has been sanitized has had most of the micro-organisms killed on a surface. 

To put it another way, sterilization usually takes more than a single method to achieve the total destruction of all micro-organisms.  Chemicals and heat, heat and pressure, pressure and radiation or some combination thereof.  Disinfection is usually achieved through the use of a chemicals alone.  Rubbing alcohol, iodine and even vodka are all good disinfectants.  Sanitization is, at least in my experience, a solution that you can have prolonged skin contact with and it won’t harm you.  Take a chemical such as Five Star Star San, to make a sanitizer the directions are to use 1 oz. in 5 gallons of water.  This is a no-rinse solution that you just leave it to dry and the surface is good to use.  To take that same chemical up to disinfectant levels would require 5-10 times as much, and I believe that it would require rinsing before use.  If your water looks like mine, this could be a problem of re-introducing micro-organisms to the surface you just prepared.

After all that, remember that what isn’t clean can’t be sanitized.  I thought I understood and was successfully applying these principles in my brewery until hearing a “Brew Strong” podcast from The Brewing Network on sanitization with Jon Herskovitz from Five Star Chemical.  While this may sound like Jon is hawking his wares via the Brew Strong show, what I found is that Jon is very conscious of this perception and is reluctant to discuss what makes the Five Star products superior in every respect.  The hosts had to drag out these facts from Jon.  After listening to this, I ordered a large container of PBW and put the Oxiclean back in the laundry room.

As a test of this “new” knowledge, I filled my brew-kettle with five gallons of water and the properly measured amount of PBW.  After heating the water to 130 F (about hot water from your sink temperature), I pumped it through the entire brewery, one piece at a time.  The “gunk” that was removed from the pot and equipment was astounding.  As you can see from the picture, most of the gunk is hop matter that had adhered to various surfaces, mostly in my plate chiller.  I had just boiled the plate chiller in a pot on the stove to get out all the “gunk”.  As you may guess, that wasn’t very effective.  Knowing what I wrote above, how can this have possible been sanitary?  You can also see a line of scale circling the inside of the pot.  This is just from the steam of the warm PBW.  I did have to scrub at that some the get it off. 

Take-away from this?  Using a more expensive, no-scrub cleaner isn’t about being lazy and not wanting to scrub;  it’s about using the proper product to ensure the brewery is “clean” so that it can be sanitized.  I have never had a beer show signs of infection in the bottle or keg but that doesn’t mean I’m good, just lucky.  I’d rather be good, that is more reproducible.  Good thing all that old beer is gone. Or is it?