Beer Forum

McDur-Ham wrote:- Each bottle I use first gets a bath in bleach water along with a thorough scrub with a bottle brush then rinse. .

Ditch the bleach and use PBW instead. Bleach is effective for killing things, but is not the best for cleaning. If there is stuff layered on, it might be possible that you are only sanitizing the surface. PBW will float that off, then proceed with your scrub and rinse before moving on to the starsan.

Exactly my thoughts. PBW is basically a caustic. It will dissolve the gunk instead of just torturing it. It's quite likely you didn't get all of it loosened up enough with your brush.

Out of curiosity, how are you adding the primer to the bottling bucket? A good technique would be to mix it with enough pre-boiled water to make it fluid, put it in the bucket first and when you're racking the beer on top of it, make sure the hose on the end of the siphon is at an angle where you have a slow whirlpool happening in the bucket. You shouldn't have the gusher problem that way.

The way you described the line leads me to believe it could be from the bleach 'cleaning', but it doesn't sound too unlike the coffee oils. Taste a few of them to at least learn as much as you can before dumping the batch. Or give them to your friends and tell them a friend named Spider brewed it.

Add your PBW cleaning and Starsan sterilizing process to your coffee addition implements. Any equipment being used to add something to the beer could be a vector for the infection. Make the coffee in a concentrate form using good pasteurization temps to kill shit. I recommend a french press and grinding the coffee to espresso grind level and using proper temp (180-200F) filtered water through the press and decanting into a sterile mason jar for cooling.

Before opening said jar for the addition, spray it with starsan, wash you hands then dunk them in starsan or use clean food service gloves.

Think of every step of your process and apply the PBW and get close to 100% sterilization to it with Starsan spray, soak,. Cleaner than a surgical unit in a hospital... whatever it takes.

NOT INFECTED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah I went ahead and opened a couple of bottles just to check. No sign of infection whatsoever. I've had a few of them now. It's a great beer, or will be. Still a little green. Good bit of grassy-ness from the hops. I may have went a little over with the warrior. The coffee is really coming through in the front and aftertaste. Great rocky dark tan head. If you can't tell, I'm a little drunk and extremely excited about this one.

Ozwald - Thats how I prime all my beers

BrewChoPs - I starsaned all of the implements I used with the coffee as well. I did the cold press after going back and listening to Spike from Terrapin. He said that when you do a hot press method, it extracts a lot of astringency and tannins from the coffee. For their wake n' bake he actually just puts a bag of coffee grinds in the the cooled wort post boil.

Thanks for the help my networks. I will be using PBW in the future and not jumping to conclusions before I try the beer.

Cheers

Awesome! Glad to hear you aren't infected on this batch! I think that using the PBW to clean (and recycling any questionable bottles) will help you avoid gushers in the future, since it sounds like you are solid on sanitizing/priming...

Good work soldier. If I had a nickel for every time I got prematurely worried about a batch ... well it wouldn't really matter cause I'd probably be making an order with Northern Brewer & blowing it anyways. Good to hear that your bottling procedure is sound, I wanted to throw it in as a possible solution to those past gushers. And you're 100% correct on the cold extracted coffee. Enjoy the coffee beers, I know I do.