I've had a run of bad luck with my beers lately. The Brown Ale I did a while back seems to be infected and the Ordinary Bitter I did last weekend is really infected. I mentioned this to Rich, a fellow homebrewer, and he pointed out that this was one of the reasons the Germans started lagering their beers during the summer. They found it hard to actually brew anything during the warmer months. Of course now we know that it is because of the higher amount of infectous bacteria in the air during the warmer seasons. I've come to the conslusion that I will either have to stop brewing during summer (nooooo!) or find better ways of keeping my un-inoculated wort away from the beasties that would love to ruin it. This last beer that I did I had a big issue with wort chilling. I chilled it down to 100f with my immersion chiller but after that it wouldn't drop. After I waited about 45mins for it to drop I decided to just cap it off and stick it in my fermentation box and let it cool. I came back down after about 3 hours and it was still at 80f. So, I pitched my yeast and closed it up. The yeast was a little suspicious as well. Usually when I just pitch a vial (OG=<1.040) I will just put the vial in my pocket and vent the CO2 every hour or so while I'm brewing. This vial never built up any pressure. I think the vial must have been exposed to some high temps while in shipment to my LHBS since it's "use by"date was Aug '07.

A couple of pics of my lost beer:




























My plan is to attempt another English beer this weekend, probably a Dark Mild or an ESB. That is if I get my chilling techniques down. I want to use a sump pump in a bucket or cooler of ice water to push water thru my immersion chiller and adding a ball-valve with a "hop stopper" like item on the inside to filter out the hops (I'm using leaf hops).

We'll see how this beer comes out. If it gets infected I may just have to stop brewing during the summer, or switch to extract brewing and return to the kitchen for a few months.

It's been a while since I last posted on here.. guess I've been too busy brewing. After my Brown Ale below I took a short break from brewing (not on purpose, just too busy) and then about 2 weeks ago I took a Friday and a Monday off from work to relax a litte and do some brewing. That Friday I did a Strawberry Wine, Saturday I did a Grape Mead/Pyment, that Sunday I did an Apple Cider and then Monday I did a Rauchbier (German Smoked Beer). All are fermenting away. I will be moving the wine over to a secondary fermenter here in the next few days and then soon after I'll do the mead. The cider is in a 3 gallon glass carboy so I may leave it unless I find that it should be moved as well. The Rauchbier is a lager, but since I can't keep temps in the 40s in my fermentation box I had to use the San Francisco lager yeast which is a hybrid yeast that will maintain lager characteristics at ale temps. I was able to get it to stay at around 57 degrees so this strain of yeast should be very clean. I hope with the smokey character of the beer any off flavors the yeast may impart will be masked. I also did a Barleywine yesterday (7-3-07) that is currently kicking. My target OG was 1.105 but I only hit 1.084. Dunno what happened since it was an extract batch. I think I may have had an issue with the specialty grains not being able to leech their sugars out of the muslin bags that I used. I need to pick up a few large straining bags for use during mini-mashes and extract w/ specialty grain brews. To the left is a pic of my fermentation box as it is this morning. The cider is in the carboy w/ the orange cap, the mead and wine are in the small plastic containers (1 gallon each) and the beer w/ the big frothy krausen layer is the barley wine. The Rauchbier is over to the right out of the pic.