Open fermenting?

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LittleCreat

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Hi all. As I mentioned in my intro thread, I’ve tried brewing beer before with limited success. At first I thought it might be due to the quality of my home brewing kit. But having discussed where I was going wrong with a friend, it turns out that I may have been using too much fluid to sterilise my kit prior to brewing. The resulting beer certainly had a funny taste to it reminiscent of chlorine or something. I’ve read that strict hygiene is not as essential as standard doctrine dictates. Many people practise open fermentation for example, even commercially. And as one person put it to me, they didn’t have sterilising fluid back in the middle ages when they brewed beer, but it was still drinkable. So what is the general consensus on strict sterilisation and airlocks etc. Essential or not?
 
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I clean my kit, basically rinsing it off with warm water and a cloth (no soap) then drying as soon as it needs cleaning - ie when emptying a FV as an example, then I sterilise with Starsan no rinse steriliser just before using again.

I don't use a bubbler (just something else to clean/sterilise), just a lid with no hole on the FV. I wouldn't open ferment, asking for problems for no benefit as I see it.

I think I am careful with cleaning/sterilisation but not to the point of being anal and spoiling my enjoyment. Never had an infection to date - 36 brews in now I think.
 
I don't use an airlock, my fermenter has a screw top lid so I just loosely put that on. I wouldn't risk open fermenting personally because I don't see a benefit, it is still used by a lot of breweries tho.
 
Hi all. As I mentioned in my intro thread, I’ve tried brewing beer before with limited success. At first I thought it might be due to the quality of my home brew kit. But having discussed where I was going wrong with a friend, it turns out that I may have been using too much fluid to sterilise my kit prior to brewing. The resulting beer certainly had a funny taste to it reminiscent of chlorine or something. I’ve read that strict hygiene is not as essential as standard doctrine dictates. Many people practise open fermentation for example, even commercially. And as one person put it to me, they didn’t have sterilising fluid back in the middle ages when they brewed beer, but it was still drinkable. So what is the general consensus on strict sterilisation and airlocks etc. Essential or not?

Not rinsing effectively enough with strong chorline steralisers is going to make your beer taste bad..

Using clean equipment and no rinse sanitisers makes this process far easier..

Going from one end of the scale to the other isn't going to give you the best results.. You just need to find a good balance.

Every beer we make will mostly likely contain wild yeasts in ect but giving your yeast a healthy fermentation to dominate is the key.

fermenting open at home is going to put you at greater risk of contamination which can in turn make you beer taste bad..
 
with chlorine based sanitisers a rigid minimum 3 x rinse policy should be adopted.
look at the far cheaper (in the long run) no rinse sanitation solutions such as videne starsan or paa.
all cost a little more initially than something like vwp? wvp? but a single bottle is a year or 2 of sanitation supplies.

sanitation is a secondary procedure to cleaning which is the crucial step, we cant steralise our equipment at home and even if we could we cant keep it sterile, so we sanitise to kill as much as possible and then pitch a huge population of yeast (measured in billions of cells) which should 99.99% of the time out eat anything else that got in.

another source of the tcp ish taste/twang to beer can be the chlorine or chloromides in the tap water, these can be neutralised easily before brewing with the water by adding a crushed campden tap to the liquor in the hlt or before using it 1 tab will treat upto 50l iirc..

good luck with future brews..



open fermentors used with a top cropping yeast
 
And as one person put it to me, they didn’t have sterilising fluid back in the middle ages when they brewed beer, but it was still drinkable. So what is the general consensus on strict sterilisation and airlocks etc. Essential or not?

It's only essential if you want to consistently produce good beer. The argument about beer being made before sanitation was understood doesn't really work because beer back then would have almost certainly always have been infected with bacteria and wild yeast because they were often simply left to ferment spontaneously. But those beers were usually drank young, before the off flavours became too prominent and they wouldn't have tasted much like what we consider good beer.

Some beers are still made in this way (lambic being a good example) but these breweries are very protective of their house blend of wild yeast and bacteria because if you don't know what is doing the fermenting then spontaneous fermentation is very much a gamble.
 
I just skimmed through this thread but could it be your water? Have you tried using bottled water?
 
I just skimmed through this thread but could it be your water? Have you tried using bottled water?

It was bottled water that I used. Improper rinsing after sterilisation sounds like the culprit. Thanks for the pointers everyone. I'll adopt the methods you have all suggested this time around and I'll let you know how I get on.
 
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