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Thank God my brewing journey began with with kegging! If I'd started with bottling my career would have been still-born.
Why does bottling give such poor results as opposed to kegging?
Essentially my bottling experience come from bottling the remains of the fermented wort after having first transferred the bulk into a corny keg.
The bottles are prepared by boiling and rinsing with starsan or Sodium metabisulphite so I'm guessing that they are clean.
I add a quarter teaspoon of sugar (store bought, refined) to assist with the secondary fermentation and I'm picking that this is where the problem lies.
The bottled conditioned beer is over gassed and generally sour to the taste.
Any suggestions? Should I leave out the additional sugar or with the beer just die in the bottle?
Tags:
'morning Des
Thanks for your prompt response...I think you nailed it in your final paragraph, re oxidation and shaking after capping. I'll be more careful next time.
I rack to a bottling bucket and stir in the priming sugar there, boiled in a bit of water to make sure it's sanitised. Needs a good stir too, to guarantee mixing. If you check out one of the priming sugar calculators such as http://www.brewersfriend.com/beer-priming-calculator/ and play with the temperatures a bit, the amount of sugar required varies wildly, so that might be part of your problem? I don't keg but I've never had a bottle with obvious problems (well, problems from bottling, anyway...).
A good point about sanitising the priming sugar...I've often wondered if that could be considered as sterile without even thinking about pre-boiling...thanks.
Good point...thanks for your suggestion.
I think the biggest risk is increased oxidisation, just getting my kegging fridge up and running I am so sick of cleaning bottles ...
:=)
Two hints in your description lead me to believe contamination ("infection") rather than oxidation. Oxidation presents in many ways, but not usually as sour.
Boiling bottles doesn't clean them. Nor do sanitisers. Sanitisers... well... sanitise! :) If there's bits of caked on dirt, or chips in the internal surface of the bottles, these could be harbouring bacteria leading to overproduction of CO2 during conditioning as the contamination takes hold and eats far more sugar than standard brewers yeast would, and leaving you with a soured and very gassy beer.
The other possibility is that your bottles are clean, and the contamination is present in all the beer - kegged and bottled, it's just that perhaps you drink the kegged beer before you notice the symptoms taking hold? That's pure speculation of course, just wondering.
Thanks Greg, both good points to consider except, one of the bottles was a new PET bottle and the beer out of the keg was at least three months old when drained and, as far as my taste buds were telling me, it was at its best.
When it comes to sanitation, I'm pretty anal...I'd hate to spoil a potentially good beer by overlooking or being slap-dash...part of my Scottish heritage I guess.
Interesting. Maybe it is the sugar. I actually missed that bit above, but I agree with the others pointing at it as a possible source of contamination.
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