AG percentage success rate

AG brewers - what sort of percentage success rate do you have?

Previously, doing kits and extract, I had a very high success rate - only 1 bad infected brew in several years of brewing. I moved to BIAB AG and had a number of successful brews, which got me hooked, however something has gone wrong (that I'm struggling to pinpoint) and I'm getting quite a few failures now.

Is it normal for AG brewing to be much more variable in terms of success?

Haven't had a bad one yet. Not in terms of infection anyway....

If you are getting infections replace all your plastic kit.

Sounds like there's something lurking that ordinary sanitising won't shift (I'm assuming your sanitising is good).

You haven't used any Brett yeast or anything like that?

37 brews with none thrown away.
Only 1 suffered from a duff recipe
1 suffered from some duff hops
Neither were bad enough to tip away though

What do you mean exactly by failures? Infections, off tastes, low abv.....

If you give us some info we might be able to come up with something?

As the wort is vigorously boiled for at least an hour your only source of infection is when you transfer to the fermenting bin. As Gareth says, get a new bin.
Personally I don't chill my wort, but transfer it to the FV about 20 minutes after switch-off, so it's just a bit less than boiling. This ought to sanitise the bin anyway, and so far I've never had an infection since I started AG last Christmas (11 completed brews). But there again I only had 1 infected brew in all the years I was making kits and that was due to bad water.

21 brews - 12 extract and 9 AG - and no failures yet.

No idea lost count of how many brews i have done but its a lot:lol: but no failures, only 2 brews i didnt like one of which is when i first started out on AG

ManseMasher said:

What do you mean exactly by failures? Infections, off tastes, low abv.....

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Astringency taste in my brews.

I'm still doing a mixture of kits, Extract and AG and it's only the AG ones that are going wrong - which I guess points to something in the mashing process.

I'm on brew no.82 in total so I kinda know what I'm doing with sanitisation, boiling, hot and cold breaks etc. I had 5 successful AGs before it started going downhill, I've posted on various forums and got 1001 reasons of what it *could* be but no definitive answer.

I asked the question because I've just got a bit downhearted with AG and am wondering whether to persevere, sounds like my experience is not the norm. My 1st AG was laughable (using all the kitchen pans with no real kit) but came out OK, just can't put my finger on what has gone wrong. :-(

Two characteritsics that have blighted my bad AG brews:

- they don't clear, despite Irish Moss in the boil in the last 15mins

- they keep on fermenting and produce very lively bottles, despite being left to ferment for 2 weeks in the warm and 1 week in the cool for the yeast to drop out before bottling, and a hydrometer reading of 1010-1008 typically.

Are you treating your water with anything, and are you getting a good hot break of crud when you boil?

Are they just overly drying out?
Maybe due to low mash temp? could be a dodgy thermometer?

ManseMasher said:

Are you treating your water with anything

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No, but it's been fine with all the other AG brews. However, to try to home in on the problem area, I did a brew with bottled water and a new batch of grain - just sampled it and it's great! So looks like either a water problem or grain milled too fine (the problem started when I got a new batch of grain from a different but well-repected supplier).

I'll make up some small-batch mashes and test the pH with various water and grain sources, but at least I'm back on track with AG now.

After 2 months the bottles from the original batch have just got worse and worse, so I've chucked them down the sink. Here's the bottle just after being emptied, huge amount of gas in there, almost had bottles bombs with a few of them. Brew had been in the primary and then secondary for a total of 20 days and finished around 1010, so pretty sure fermentation had finished. Does this point to some sort of infection? Wasn't the full-on TCP taste that I normally associate with an infected brew.

does your water company change the sources of water summer versus winter??...thinking alkalinity changes might impact mash ph .....but you'd pick that up in lower than expected gravities from the mash. Can't explain the foaming bottles... I'm using salifert alkalinity tests since actual alkalinity varies through the year. Test kit is cheap at £5 +P&P and will do many tests.

I've had both your problems.

Astringency - It may not actually be astringency.

Your making a beer with bottled water to test out whether your water is the problem seems to indicate just that - what beers are you making that have this 'astingency problem'? or is it all of them
(My) London (hard) water isn't suited to making pale beer so my bitters had a' bitter ' edge to them not the smooth bittering I was after.I once brewed a small 5L batch that definately turned out astringent. It only ever happened once so I didn't pursue the cause. The 5L astringent beer definately a different taste to when I try to make pale beer with my utreated tap water. This promted to to start investigating water treatment. I now use CRS acid to adjust my water whenever I make bitters (which isn't that often tbh). I haven't got everything right yet with water treatment but my bitters are much better than they were

Over attenuation - The cause is probably wild yeast. I've had this problem twice, through my own fault. I brew in the kitchen and Mrs MQ is vitually a fruitarian. We always have an overflowing fruit bowl in the kitchen - wild yeast love fruit as much as Mrs MQ does. I attribute my wild yeast infections to taking gravity samples just after the krausen has died down and seeing as there's probably loads of wild yeast spores flying around in the area from the fruit bowl this is how I think my brew got infected. I've taken samples later in the fermentation process and even leave my FV open to the air for long periods of time during bottling time without infection so I put the times I've got infections down to this early stage in fermentation. Needless to say I no longer open my FV until bottling time

Wild yeast seem to very work slowly in the bottle (I'm pretty sure it's because they're not adapted to wort the way brewers yeast it) and slowly but surely over attenuate the beer. With the infections I had, my beers got down to 1.003 when they should have stopped at about 1.010, with an attendant beer fountain upon opening. They also had no decernable off flavour at all. So I drank quite a bit of the batches before it was too thin to be nice to drink.

Wild yeast also seem to be immune from star san (dont know about other sanitsers as apart from milton when I first started brewing I've only have used star san ). So to get rid of the infection you need to take the nuclear option. Anything plastic (FV's syphons etc) I bleached - iirc 100ml to 2L of water. Bottles I ovened

http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=54300

I actually still oven my bottles even now, before bottling day

Thanks MyQul, yes I was brewing in the kitchen, in the summer with a big bowl of fruit and some fruit flies lurking about. I had another bottled brew do this too, didn't taste off, just kept going and going and I eventually had 3 exploding bottles - and I'm normally super-careful to ensure it's stopped fermenting before bottling. So it does sound like it's wild yeast.

Regarding the water, I'm going to get some pH test papers and make up some small mashes to determine what (if anything) I need to do to my water.

you could check out the water company website for their water analysis. Each water company publishes different combinations of data so you probably won;t get everything you want but you will get some idea, even if only hard water or soft. The Malvern spring water has almost nothing in it, but assume the public water supply comes from elsewhere. Key figures are alkalinity (as Bicarbonate or as Ca CO3) and Cacium, but even a total hardness (as CaCO3) will be a good pointer as to whether you might benefit from treatment of liquor with CRS acid solution (or not).

darrellm said:

Thanks MyQul, yes I was brewing in the kitchen, in the summer with a big bowl of fruit and some fruit flies lurking about. I had another bottled brew do this too, didn't taste off, just kept going and going and I eventually had 3 exploding bottles - and I'm normally super-careful to ensure it's stopped fermenting before bottling. So it does sound like it's wild yeast.

Regarding the water, I'm going to get some pH test papers and make up some small mashes to determine what (if anything) I need to do to my water.

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Those general PH test strips arent sensitive enough as your aiming for a mash PH of (iirc) between 5.2-.5.5. I have some narrow range PH strips

http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk...Strips_4.6_-_6.2_Pack_of_50.html#.Vll-v15ugQk

But tbh all PH strips will tell you is (obviously) the PH of your mash but not what to do when you know the figure.

As Tartanspecial say one of the key figures if water alkalinity. As I understand it, once you control/adjust your water alkalinity your mash PH automaticaly adjusts to the correct values.

You can look at your water conpanies online report for a guide but you can actually test your water alkalinity yourself quite cheaply with a Salifert Alkalinity test kit

http://www.brewuk.co.uk/salifert-test.html

To give you an idea how 'ball park' the online water company reports can be, my (Thames Water) online water report for my area says 230ppm but when I test my own water with the kit its 188ppm. A bitter needs to be 50ppm or below. So I have been using brupaks CRS solution (and the forum water calc) to lower my water alkalinity

darrellm said:

Regarding the water, I'm going to get some pH test papers and make up some small mashes to determine what (if anything) I need to do to my water.

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If you send me 10 ml of your water I can test it for you for both alkalinity and for Calcium (i have both kits). Your water company should hopefully report Sodium, Chloride and sulphate. They may or may not report magnesium, however with the above you should have enough to plug into the forum water calculator and see if any significant treatment is recommended.