Month: November 2019

Our kit has been thoroughly cleaned, well most of it has. On Monday it was time to test it out so we used an old kit (a year past its best) with new yeast. If we manage to brew without infection or off-tastes when we’ll know that, at least, some of our kit is ok.

A full-grain brew is still a way off. We’re short of buckets and some tubing, and there’s still a fair few components which haven’t been cleaned/disinfected/sanitied/sterilised properly or at all. And we still have to clean the room itself.

The plan with the kit beer is to split it (into the non-existant buckets) and use up a fair quantity of hops doing some serious dry hopping. The kit beer itself is pretty poor so we’re hoping that a) the hops will make it drinkable and b) we improve our knowledge on hopping and hop combinations.

The set:

• Bramling Cross/BRU-1
• Citra/Simcoe/Pioneer
• First Gold/GP75
• HBC431/Motueka
• Nelson Sauvin/Styrian Wolf/Wai-iti

Let’s see what happens…

We’ve not brewed much for a while.

The last one was a Coniston Bluebird clone but we had to dump a corny keg full of it because of an infection.

We think that doing wild ferments of wort or mash in the small plastic buckets caused them to become permanently innoculated. Then using these buckets to shift grain and wort around just spread the infection.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been slowly documenting all our kit, breaking it down into component parts and cleaning them. We have a spreadsheet of items v. cleaning methods. The various method are washing powder, VWP, Bruzyme, Bruclean, Washing machine, dish washer, oven, steam, starsan. Some stuff will get most of these, some just one or two. The longer the beer says in contact with an item, the more we’ll clean it. Obviously the fermenters are most vulnerable so they’ll be cleaned many times.

We’re replacing all the tubing, many of the seals and all the buckets. We’ll keep the fermenters, unless we see further infections.

We also want to clean the brewing room itself just in case something is clinging to the walls or ceiling.

Once we’ve cleaned and replaced everything we’ll brew an old kit and hope that there’s no infection. The Simply Pale Ale kits aren’t great so we’re planning on splitting it and using a serious quantity of a variety of hops to hide the bad flavours.