Failure

The Dunkle has gone down the drain.

This is not the first beer that I have dumped. I brewed the Dunkle back before Thanksgiving. OG measured out at 1.058, which was right on target. After the first week, Krausen had fallen, things were looking good and I took my first gravity reading. It was a disappointing 1.024 when my target was 1.013. I gave it another week and checked the gravity again, it was still 1.024. It hadn't budged a single point in a week.

Thanksgiving came, and I went out of town for the holiday. I figured that I could give the beer another week or two with no problems at all, I still had a couple on tap, plus more to keg while it sorted itself out. It never did drop below 1.024, so all of the following has a big question in my mind on whether or not it was due to the gravity stall. I figured I'd go with it regardless when a keg opened up.

I left it alone after the second gravity reading was showing no movement and bypassed it in kegging order with the Black IPA (which is still tasty). Once the English Pale was finished right around Christmas I had an open tap to fill so I pulled out the Dunkle.

From the get go I thought I might possibly have an issue. I should have taken a picture, but unfortunately I didn't. Most of the time with long fermentation times, and this one was going on 6 weeks in primary, you have a nice clean looking beer. This particular one looked like it might have had some residual CO2 bubbles still on the surface, not much at all really. I cold crashed it for a few days as I normally do before I keg anything.

Once I pulled it out of the fridge to transfer it to a keg I got a closer look. The only way I can describe it was that it appeared to have very tiny (about 1 mm across at the largest) white spheres on the surface. It was by no means pervasive, maybe several dozen or so and like I said, tiny looking. In 5 gallons of beer, not really very much at all. As I was transferring to the keg, I noticed a few dozen more along the sides of the carboy, and some on the surface of the racking cane. At this point I was already worried about an infection in the beer, I tasted it as well and thought that it might have 'something' off about it but it wasn't carbed yet so wasn't totally sure.

In the keg it went, and got carbed up. After a few days at high pressure I tasted it again, and I wasn't sure whether or not my paranoia was kicking in, but it just tasted a bit ..... off. Hard to describe, other than a bit of a chemically taste to it. This is one of the reasons I want to train as a judge, so that I can tell exactly what is going on, even in a bad beer.

I kept it on tap for a while to see if it would mellow with full carb. Drank a few pints of it myself, and took a growler of the Dunkle and the Black IPA to a house party on New Years Eve. Everyone loved the Black IPA, but were all 'meh' on the Dunkle. I just couldn't get over my own paranoia that it was infected with something.

I gave it another go tonight, and I thought that I had worked past the paranoia, or the flavors had mellowed and it might be alright. But....... I had also just eaten a dill pickle before tasting it. Once I cleansed my palate of the dill, I tried again, and sure enough the strange chemical taste was still there.

Down the drain it went. I know you can drink a beer that has been infected, it won't do you any harm. But I just can't keep 5 gallons of it on tap and force my way through it at the leisurely pace that I consume my beer now. I also won't force it on my wife, who is a party to all my doubts about any beer. She knows I thought it might be infected, I won't keep anything like that from her and make her a gueinea pig.

The only bad thing is, I've never made a Dunkleweise before, so I had no base of comparison on that, but I've made plenty of Hefes to know that this one wasn't quite right.

Now the Ranger Danger is cold crashing to take it's place in the keg lineup. That one I am really looking forward to as it was my first AG beer. An associate of mine pointed me to the recipe, and he has his example so that we can compare as well.

My thoughts on what could have happened? Well, I must not have been diligent enough in sanitizing my beer thief. That was the only object that went into the beer once it was in the carboy. It is the only possible source of an infection. The Black IPA was tested at the same time with the same beer thief, but it is just fine. It also went into a keg several weeks ahead of the Dunkle. If the infection that I suspect was introduced by taking sample readings, the Dunkle had more time for it to take hold.

I've checked both the Ranger Danger and the Brown Turkey that are still in carboys and neither of them exhibit the same symptoms. Neither of them have had their airlocks off of them since they were brewed and neither show any signs of infection.

Either way, I'm now going to be scrubbing the crap out of my beer thief and racking cane. I'm also going to toss out all the fluid lines I use post brew, I have plenty to spare.

It is disappointing to have to dump out nearly a full keg of beer, but I have plenty more to drink. This is also not the first infection I have had. My peach experiment got infected much worse than this one. It was very obvious with big bulbous fuzzy growth all over the peaches. That one only got away from me because that was during the week that my daughter was born and I couldn't tend to the peaches soaking in the completed beer at all (you have to keep the peaches submerged to avoid the possibility).

It is a one of those learning experiences that keeps you on your toes about disinfecting everything that may come into contact with the beer.

Live and learn.

Another question I have to deal with now. I washed and saved the yeast from that carboy, is this going to have the same infection (if thats what it was) lurking around in the yeast samples I saved. I think it might, and to assuage my paranoia I think I am going to have to dump out the yeast samples. No big deal, I'm not even really sure what yeast strain it is, it came from a Brewers Best kit from the LHBS. It won't kill me to dump them.