Ok let’s be honest and get those home brewing “sins” off your chest I will start
Forgive me Ninkasi for I have sinned:
- I rinse excess foam when using no rinse sanitizer
- I never make a starter when using fresh liquid yeast
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i secondaried for many, many, many years religiously because i didnt like excess trub in bottles (i didnt keg).
finally have tried to settle on yeasts that flocculate well, and try to cold crash , and kegging fixes all that.
I dont think ill secondary again.
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I don’t clean my keg lines nearly often enough.
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I don’t either. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s only a problem if I get off-flavors, which I never have, even after not cleaning the lines for a year or more. Upstream cleaning and sanitation, and regularly flushing the lines (with beer!) makes all the difference for downstream issues (or lack thereof).
As a homebrewer vs. a commercial brewery, I can afford to be reactive vs. proactive.
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My latest cleaning was prompted by grunge in my lines that ended up as flakes in the beer…some circulated cleaner toom care of it, and the flavor also improved!
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IIRC, you are in SoCal near where I used to be (Upland/Ontario). Super hard water, not conducive to brewing. The grunge in your lines might be various calcium-induced precipitates, e.g. beerstone. And then the crud traps yeast and other grunge and beer flows past. Are you able to tell if you get cleaner lines when you use RO water?
Yes, I’m indeed in that area, and the water is pretty awful for many purposes, particularly lighter grain bills. I haven’t really noticed any difference between RO batches and tap water batches, but I haven’t been looking either!
I have a confession and everyone may want to hold their beers for this one. Since 1995 I’ve been a bottler and still bottle to this day… and I like it.
I know I’ll probably be shunned from the group, but it feels good that the truth is finally out there.
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Maybe it’s because I don’t have a lot of equipment, but I find cleaning to be therapeutic. Early mornings, cup of coffee, chill music, no rush. I can almost look forward to it. Make a virtue out of necessity, as they say
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I too do not clean my lines enough. I need to remedy that. I also need to passivate my boil kettle more often as I do get a buildup of beer stone in the bottom of the kettle. Repentance is in order.
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I don’t use any advanced techniques for reducing cold-side oxidation. I bottle condition, and filling bottles to 1/2" from the top is my only oxygen-reduction step that I take. The real safeguard is that I plan my brewing so that it’s bottled and conditioned at the time the previous batch is gone. I just don’t give it time to oxidize - it’s gone three weeks after being conditioned.
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I haven’t taken apart my keg connectors and posts to clean the poppets in over 20 years, I just run Oxyclean solution, rinse water, and Star San solution through them.
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I use vinegar to control mash pH. No my beer does not taste like vinegar at all and I’ve never heard any complaints of sourness in the finished beers.
I still brew on my stovetop. Every batch, always. Almost 200 batches now. Most of these were bottled. But now I have 3 uKeg Go’s and I LOVE them.
I HATE bottling, and I dislike kegging almost as much as well. I enjoy brewing but when it comes to packaging I am extremely lazy. Many batches have gone bad because “maybe I’ll package it tomorrow” then the next day say the same thing, for several weeks or even MONTHS.
I don’t drink much, maybe 1 or 2 beers per week on average, many weeks with zero, but I do love to brew (it’s all about the science and math and creativity aspects), so of course I have literally about 10-11 cases of mostly old beer and cider in my cellar at any given moment in time. Some goes bad and eventually I pour it down the drain. On the other hand a lot of the older stuff still tastes just fine to me. I do try to drink an older beer once a week, but of course… see above. Fresher beer is always better so then sometimes my older beer just gets older and older. My friends say “Dave has a drinking problem!.. he doesn’t drink enough!!” which is always met by laughter including from myself. I do love great beer and strive to brew some. I just… don’t drink it very fast. In the rare instance though where it turns out awesome, I drink it up relatively quickly, maybe it only hangs around for a couple months instead of a couple years.
I brew in small batches, around 1.5 to 2 gallons most of the time. I can and have brewed 5-6 gallons many times. I just usually don’t. Why? There are a zillion reasons, but mostly… see above.
Small batches consistently lead to greater oxidation. Ask me how I know this to be a fact, to which I’ll say once again – see above. I think I’m going to start aiming for the lighter end of the style, and smaller fermenters, in addition to the existing sulfite additions, to try to help control this better. But it might be a permanent plague for me. And I’ll drink it anyway… eventually!
I don’t know as much about yeast as I wish I knew. More experiments are needed.
So there you have presented to you half the skeletons in my closet. Enjoy.
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I’ve enjoyed all your posts about yeast. Always very interesting.
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BOTTLERS UNITE!
I stand with you. I enjoy bottling for many reasons including:
- I like small batches. I’ve found that 2.5 gallon batches are my sweet spot.
- I like variety. I currently have 12 different beers representing 4 different styles.
- I like sharing. I give my friends beers to sample with the caveat that they only get more if they return my bottles. You know what? It works.
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No shunning. I still bottle some of my beers after almost twenty years. I like to keep sour/brett beers out of the tap lines. I also don’t think many Belgian beers are as good on draft as bottles where it’s easier to get them highly carbonated. Kegging is fairly recent to my homebrewing journey. I like having kegs where I can control the volume of beer and sometimes do odd blends in the glass. I also have a beer engine and I feel like that’s a completely different experience from either kegged or bottled beer.
A lot of people tend to move to kegging because it’s supposedly less work and faster. I’m not sure I agree. Maybe I’m wrong. It just doesn’t feel like a significant difference in time when you factor in keg/system maintenance and driving around to refill CO2. I still like the convenience factor of kegging even if I’m not saving time packaging.
IMO package your beer however you enjoy the brewing and drinking experience the most.
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maybe im just in the honeymoon phase, but i was a life-long bottler for about 15 years and switched to kegging a few months ago. IMHO large time saver.
when you start to collect bottles over periods of years you end up having to do bottle checks regularly, box by box, if you want them to be clean enough to use. probably depends at least partially on what your water is like too.
you end up having to do quarterly deep-cleans and removing some that look too gross to keep using.
the main advantage of bottling is being able to keep some beers around for longer than 6 months to a year, which is tough obv with a keg. im not even sure of how that would work kegged - perhaps its doable to keg-carb with sugar at room temp a whole keg and just maintain it until use?
imho there is zero question that cleaning 1 keg, the liquid line and tap and adding your beer directly to it is much less work than bottling. imho, its like 90 mins total removing the old keg and lines, disassembling+cleaning it out, sanitizing it, adding your new beer and youre done. the true time in bottling is about 3 hours IMHO (collecting necessary bottles, making sure theyre good to use, cleaning each then sanitizing, bottling is at least 1 hour)
and it is a far more labour intensive and space intensive practice.
all that said yes i still bottle if its something like an imperial stout or whatever. I have just been really pleased with kegging so far. even really enjoying how it matures in the keg.
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everyone here is clearly making homebrew wrong! you need a 5 gal bucket (regular white bucket preferred, but you can also use a 5 gal cooler as well. the stand up kind not the coolers that are small and rectangular.) use exactly 4lbs of sugar, fill your bucket with water mix in the sugar into the water and stir really well. make sure the water temp is between 99-104 degrees F. then add your active dry yeast 4oz glass jar into ur bucket and use a whisk. stir the top so the yeast breaks down then stir in the center of ur bucket like u’d stir ur cup of coffee. then immediately cover ur bucket and store it in a warm area, make sure ur bucket is wrapped with a type of clothing u don’t wear at all, so the bucket don’t go cold. if ur bucket goes cold then your yeast and sugary water wont ferment well at all. and if u make ur water too hot then you’ll burn the yeast which wouldn’t ferment well either. then wait anywhere between 24-120 hours. if you let your brew sit too long, it’ll basically turn into vinegar. and no one like vinegar lol. have fun!
read my comment bro. hope that helps 
if you want me to explain how to make 5 gals or less of brew comment me back. I’ve literally had years of experience in this ■■■■. I grew up in a village in Alaska where it was almost impossible to sneak in hard liquor into the villages. so the alternative was making our own alcohol. follow my instructions exactly how i’ll explain it to you and it’ll turn out great for you as well. this process def beats the beers that people buy from the liquor stores. it may actually be stronger than the beers at the stores frfr