mkade
Well-Known Member
I'm not one to write a thread freaking out that my beer is infected and ruined. On the other hand, in a few recent brews, I've been noticing a disturbing trend. I brewed a tripel 2-3 months ago, which I fermented on a temperature ramp pitching at 65, and getting up to 82 over the next week. After a total of ten days, it hit the secondary for a month. When I bottled it, it had reached an apparent attenuation of 100%, but the hydrometer sample was delicious. It had apple overtones to it, but not overwhelming. After being in the bottle, this intensified. More recently, I made a batch of Ed Wort's Haus Pale. I recall the sample tasting fine. It reached a FG of 1.010. After force carbonating in the keg, I tried one last night, and it was bigtime apple on both the nose and in the taste. This put together with some bottles of porter that I had stored away for 9 months that went totally sour makes me worry. I have made kombucha before in this house. I live in the Santa Barbara area, and I worry that geography, or the kombucha culture, or some other factor could be leading to me getting aceto infections. I've made several other beers in this same time period without these problems, so I'm really not sure what to think. I recall talking to a winemaker at one of the local wineries, and he was telling me that the facility that they took over had a really bad malolactic bug problem from the previous winery, so they have to try really hard whenever they're making something they don't want to undergo malolactic fermentation, so it seems likely that any one particular local might be more likely to different types of bacterial/wild yeast problems. Does anyone have thoughts, or does any have experience with consistently getting a particular infection? I should add that I'm confident that my sanitation procedures are good, and I'm fermenting in glass and not plastic.