At some point this summer, somehow, I picked up an infection in my equipment. And it has proceeded to screw up the hobby for me ever since.
I have four LBK’s for fermenting, two Walmart slimlines for bottling, and of course, lots of other plastic that touches beer along the way (hydro jar, turkey baster “thief,” siphon, tubing, bottling wand, spigots, and probably more).
I'm not sure of the cause, but the issue might have started when I over-tightened a spigot on an LBK and created a crack near the hole. Around the same time, I also had some stress cracks develop on one of my slimlines (a fairly common occurrence, from what I gather). I have since tossed both of those items, and bleach-bombed most everything else. Regardless of where it started, it seems to have spread throughout my system. Practically every batch since mid-summer has been impacted in one way or another -- about 5 or 6 batches in total.
Not every batch is impacted the same way. One beer, a Cal Common, was super-phenolic, in Belgian/peppery way. Another beer smelled like nail polish remover (that one got dumped quickly!). Several have been over-carbed and gushers, sometimes with off-flavors or aromas, but others not. One batch in-between the gushers was carbed OK, but tasted sour.
Since everything that touches my beer after it leaves the kettle is plastic, at this point I have resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to have to toss a whole lot of equipment and start over.
Bottom line, it royally sucks to invest money on ingredients and – more importantly – lots of time on the process, only to arrive at tasting day and find out that the whole thing was a colossal waste. And then, the only way to fix it is to throw away MORE money’s-worth of equipment, and spend even MORE money, buying replacements.
I normally give out a lot of bottles of homebrew to family & friends at Christmas time. But this year, the utility sink drain has been getting all my gifts, and I won’t be giving out much in the way of homebrew.
Between this issue, and being incredibly busy with life in general lately, it’s been difficult for me to keep up the enthusiasm for brewing. But strangely, I have never seriously considered using this as a reason to say “screw it, I'll just buy good craft beer to drink." I guess I truly am hooked...
