Author: Marshall Schott

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein ~

I trust many people view as silly the extent to which we here at Brülosophy go to test certain aspects of brewing. I don’t necessarily disagree. It seems ludicrous for most homebrewers to invest the time, energy, and money into making a batch of beer that, for all intents and purposes, shouldn’t be very good. Thankfully, perhaps luckily, the variables we’ve tested thus far haven’t seemed to have this effect, in fact nearly every xBmt batch produced has resulted in both beers being at least drinkable.

Okay, I’ve written about a few quasi-xBmts, if you will, where I put some haphazard hypothesis to the test and the resultant beers were utter shit, but even those I wouldn’t necessarily consider failed xBmts since they still provided some meaningful data– WLP090 likely isn’t used to bottle condition Port Brewing beers, shit harvested from a bush in my front yard doesn’t make good beer, and leftover wort sloppily soured with grains was terrible. In all of these cases, I wasn’t performing a triangle test, the question of “whether or not” was still essentially addressed. Relative to our purposes here, failure only occurs when something goes so awry in an xBmt that it makes collecting and/or reporting the data impossible.

Today, I’ll be sharing my experience with the first officially failed xBmt. I wasn’t sure how to go about this, initially considering formatting it like a typical xBmt article, though given the fuck up figured it’d be best to do things differently. Since I already had the pics, I’ll share them, though I’ll admit it’s partially to demonstrate my process remained the same and ultimately support my theory as to the source of the problem.

This xBmt started just like any other, I settled on the variable to be tested, boil length, and a beer style I thought would help exemplify any potential differences. A couple days before brewing, I built up a rather large starter of WLP029 from a jar I’d harvested from another starter about 8 weeks prior.

The evening before my brew day, I collected 1 liter from the starter to save for later then tossed the flask in my cold chamber to crash overnight. At this point, I noticed the faint aroma of banana wafting from the collection jar, but I told myself this was something I’d experienced before and blamed it on the warm (75°F) environment within which the starter fermented. The following morning, I got to brewing as usual, mashing in and hitting my target temp for both batches.

Following a 1 hour mash, I collected the wort from each batch and proceeded to boil, both receiving the first hop addition at the 30 minute mark to accommodate for the short-boil batch. Chugging right along.

Despite the 1 hour difference in boil length, the OG between the batches was only 0.002 apart, which isn’t perfect, but certainly close enough.

I filled separate 6 gallon PET carboys and placed them in my fermentation chamber to finish chilling, a requirement for me during this time of year when my groundwater temp hovers around 76°F. A few hours later, I returned to find both worts sitting at my target fermentation temperature. After decanting the starter, I evenly split the slurry between both fermentors and noticed obvious signs of activity just 12 hours later.

A couple days in is when I began to notice a faint whisper of banana aroma emanating from my chamber, which I optimistically concluded had everything to do with the 66°F fermentation temperature and use of wheat malt. Why? Probably denial. I returned to check the FG after about 10 days, both appeared to have finished just a tad drier than I expected, though given the low mash temp of 156°F (yeah), I wasn’t terribly concerned.

The hydrometer samples tasted, umm, yeasty. Yeah, that’s it, the yeast was contributing a banana character with a little clove in the background. Nothing a 2 day cold crash and fining with gelatin couldn’t fix. I kegged the cold, clear beer about 2 weeks after brewing it.

After 24 hours at 40 psi in my keezer, I dropped the pressure to 13 psi and pulled a pint. Even after nearly 500 batches, this always excites me, the culmination of so much effort represented in a single 16 ounce pour. Except when it sucks, which in this case, it sort of did. But it looked pretty.

I sampled both side-by-side and detected absolutely no DMS in either beer, though it’s wholly possible any creamed spinach character was covered up by the almost Hefeweizen-like yeast character I was certain would lager out, so I held off on collecting data for 10 days. To me, the time had helped a little bit, I mean, I’d been sampling both beers daily and would have sworn any this-shouldn’t-be-in-a-Kölsch flavor was dwindling. And so, to participants the beers were served.

The first participant was Scott Bailey, a board member of the local San Joaquin Worthogs homebrew club. After completing the triangle test portion, he continued onto the comparative evaluation, which toward the end includes a description of the xBmt and the style of beer used. When he read it was a Kölsch, he immediately turned to me, eyes squinted in a demonstrably puzzled fashion, and said he assumed this was some sort of Saison or Belgian yeast xBmt.

Greeeeaaaaat…

Next up was Wes Tarvin, the dude who spent months isolating an infection only to discover it was his nasty valves. Similar story, except he was making faces of obvious displeasure from his first taste during the triangle test. He was slightly more frank than Scotty, saying something like, “This doesn’t taste like any Kölsch I’ve ever had, I get way too much clove.”

Mmm hmm…

Finally, Brülosophy contributor Ray Found stopped by my place while driving through on his way home from a work trip. He was aware of the nature of the xBmt and wasn’t asked to complete the survey, though I’d yet to mention anything else about the beers except that it was a Kölsch. Upon first sip, Ray, in his gentle and ever-so-sensitive manner, offered the following words:

“This isn’t a fucking Kölsch, you know that, right? This tastes more like a Hef, a shitty one at that.”

We began to discuss the potential issues and eventually whittled our way to a culprit. Based on the fact both batches were equally compromised, we determined a post-pitch contamination was highly unlikely, which left us with really only 1 reasonable source: the yeast. Somehow over the course of 7 uses, the WLP029 I’d been harvesting must have picked something up, likely a wild yeast, which was propagated in a starter and split between 2 carboys full of my beer.

What was I to do with this mess of a Kölsch? I proposed the idea of continuing to collect data for the xBmt since, you know, the infection was a constant. However, Ray was adamant that we pass on this one, convinced the phenolics and esters produced by whatever wreaked havoc on the beers would arguably get in the way of participants perceiving any actual differences caused by boil length.

I finally accepted defeat. And so it goes…

Anxious about the other jars of harvested yeast in my collection, I spent some time the following weekend going through my yeast fridge. While rifling through the 15+ samples, I ended up tossing a couple jars that were just too old and I had no plans to use, then eventually stumbled on a jar of WLP029 harvested on the same date from the same starter as the jar I’d used for this xBmt. Surely, if the yeast was indeed to blame, this jar would contain aromas similar to that of the beer I’d just poured down the drain.

Bingo!

When I opened that jar and immediately recognized the smell, it all came together, the yeast was responsible, and I started breathing again, relieved I wouldn’t have to spend months isolating a million little things to try to discover the source of the pesky problem. Whew.

When you brew as often as I do, the chances of something going awry naturally increase. The fact this is the first unintentionally contaminated batch I’ve ever made, at least that I can recall resulting in a dumper, ameliorates some of the shame. And since the beer wasn’t consumed, I like to think it doesn’t count against my 200 gallon federal allotment.

Without giving too much away and potentially biasing my participant pool, I will say that a new boil length xBmt of similar nature is underway, the results of which ought to be out soon… ish.

Support Brülosophy In Style!

All designs are available in various colors and sizes on Amazon!

Follow Brülosophy on:

| Read More |

18 Ideas to Help Simplify Your Brew Day

7 Considerations for Making Better Homebrew

List of completed exBEERiments

How-to: Harvest yeast from starters

How-to: Make a lager in less than a month

| Good Deals |

Brand New 5 gallon ball lock kegs discounted to $75 at Adventures in Homebrewing

ThermoWorks Super-Fast Pocket Thermometer On Sale for $19 – $10 discount

Sale and Clearance Items at MoreBeer.com

If you enjoy this stuff and feel compelled to support Brulosophy.com, please check out the Support Us page for details on how you can very easily do so. Thanks!

Advertisements

Share this: Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Tumblr

Email



Like this: Like Loading...