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.