Hi all. I think I may have had my first infection. I have a Northern English Brown that I carbed pretty low and after about 2 months in the bottle I started getting excesive carbonation. Not gushers but definitely WAY over carbed. I could detect an of flavor in the form of a bit of souring maybe? The beer was clear. Not sure where my procedural breakdown occured but my plan is to replace all my siphon hoses and soak all my siphon, bottling and “wort contact” apparatus in PBW. I batch prime and bottle using a bucket. The bucket seems OK, I don’t scrub it when I clean it, in fact, I don’t really do much other than rinse it really well between bottling batches and starsan it. I do remove the tap every time and rinse it as well.
I’m on the fence on whether or not to replace the bucket or just let it soak over night in PBW.
It did finish at my intended FG. stayed there for a few days before I bottled. The carbonaion level was about right for something like 5 weeks then it started to get a little crazy like 1 inch of beer and 5 inches of foam in the glass. So far, my plan is o run out to the LHBS and get new hoses and a spigot. I mostly just rinse my bottling stuff, siphon and bucket after a bottling session. I wonder If I should be hitting it with PBW or if thats overkill.
as long as you dissolve the PBW it’s not overkill. I imagine the PBW if undissolved might scratch the bucket though, at least that’s always my concern.
Is it every bottle? or at least every bottle you’ve opened since you noticed the problem?
How much priming sugar did you add? And does it taste infected?
If it’s not truly infected, you could decarb the bottles a bit. Get somebody to help you. They crack them open and how recap them. You have to be ninja quick, or you’ll have a mess. I saved a beer by doing this once. I actually recapped twice before they were good.
The way it played out was, I opened a bottle last night and it was almost all foam and had a bit of an off taste. the previous bottles I had from this batch we’re OK up to this point. I had about 12 bottles left so I checked another. There semed to be a bit more trub in the bottom of the remaining bottles. The next one was exactly the same, as was the next one and so on. Something was going on for sure. The bottles Weren’t gushers and did not foam over. I only got exces foaming when I poured so I can only assume it was a low level infection of sorts. As for the carbing level. I added 1.8 ounces of corn sugar to 2.5 gallons of beer. was supposed to be around 2.3 vol of CO2.
You probably just need to replace all plastic and rubber components, then your problems will disappear. It happens. It’s happened to me a dozen times or more. Eventually I switched to glass fermenters and I’ll never use plastic again. Can’t get away from the tygon hoses but I’ll just replace those every couple of years.
I’ve never had an infection problem with better bottles. IME, you can clean and sanitize them pretty much just as well as glass. I’ve had one or two batches that went south in the last few years but I did not have to toss the fermenter, just the nasty beer.
When I’ve had bottles that are badly overcarbed, the yeast from the bottom of the bottle gets dragged up into suspension when you open them. I believe this causes additional nucleation sites for more foaming and it also has an impact on flavor. I wonder if that’s what you’re tasting?
What is your cleaning and sanitation process for your bottles? it is a distinct possibility that the bottles needed to be cleaned better. Not saying that the other stuff isn’t infected, but I would not rule out the bottles as the culprit in light of the length of time the infection took to show up.
