That was the question my mother asked me many years ago when I first started homebrewing beer. Up to that point, I never really thought about the possibility. Making beer seemed such a simple process that the idea of making a "bad batch" was impossible, wasn't it? So like many young adult sons do, I ignored my mother's question, laughing it off.
Several batches of homebrew later, I popped the top off of a bottle of homebrew, carefully poured the beer into a Pilsner glass, and prepared to consume. As my mouth neared the glass, my nose picked up hints of an unpleasant fragrance. Moments later, with disgust, I was spitting sour beer into the sink. What happened to my beloved homebrew? Why did my beer fail me?
The simple answer is that I failed my beer. By getting sloppy about sanitation procedures and taking a "what me worry?" approach to long lag times between boiling the wort and active fermentation, I had set my beer up for a fall. After spending several hours making the beer, waiting a couple of weeks for it to ferment, bottling the beer, and waiting a couple of more weeks for it to finish, the last thing that anyone wants to do is to pour five gallons of finished, infected beer into the sink, bottle by bottle. Someone should have played a funeral dirge to complete the scene.
Fortunately, I learned my lesson and have never had another infected brew (knock on wood). Along with some intangibles, like luck and good tap water, there have been two major keys to my success: sanitation and short lag time. In this column, I will discuss sanitation.
Some people confuse sterilization with sanitation. In the homebrewing environment, it's very difficult to achieve sterilization--unless you have an autoclave laying around the house, which sterilizes by superheated steam under pressure. We can achieve nearly the same results by boiling the heck out of the wort for sixty minutes or so. The critical time period, however, occurs after the boil and before vigorous fermentation begins.
Everything that will touch the wort should be sanitized. My own method is to make up a five gallon bucket of water with a half cup of bleach. Before and after use, every utensil or piece of equipment goes into that bucket and is well rinsed. That includes thermometers, stirring spoons, siphon tubes, hydrometers, and fermentation vessels.
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