A few weeks back, I sent a couple beers in to be reviewed. Both were cream ales, one brewed with munich and one with rye. The guys liked the rye but not the munich, a response I expected. However, there was a comment made about a possible infection in the Munich.
This had me stumped for a week or so. The keg it had been taken from was definitely not infected (sampled it extensively to make sure) and all bottles and caps had been thoroughly cleaned and sanitized prior to bottling. Then I tried another bottle of the munich that had been filled at the same time as the ones I sent. It was infected just as the guys said!
This narrowed it down to the fill process. My normal process is to pour using a picnic tap on a long hose with a short piece of tubing on the spout. This lowers the pour pressure way down and allows me to fill from the bottom of the bottle. After I am done filling bottles, I hook the tap up to a keg of StarSan and run a bunch of sanitizer through it to rinse it out and sanitize it again. This method has worked for the past year or so.
Normally, I only use this bottling method for extremely short storage, i.e. filling bottles to take to a brew club meeting or to a party. This time I filled those bottles a couple of weeks before sending them to the Brewcasters and let them sit a room temperature during that time.
I dismantled my picnic tap and found all sorts of cud in there! Looking back, I realize that it had probably been a year since cleaning that tap. In spite of the immediate rinsing with StarSan each time, some bits of crud had built up in there giving the infection a place to start. I hadn't noticed this before since everything else bottled this way was drunk within 24 hours and was under refrigeration most of that time.
I post this a reminder to dismantle and thoroughly clean your taps on a regular basis no matter how clean you think they are. Since I have the day off today, I am also taking apart and cleaning all my QD's. These are all easy to take apart and don't take much time or effort to clean (unless you save them all up to do at once).
Wayne
