And we worry about infection

[micklupulo]

The trouble is that as human beings we might overreact to past bad experiences. After a successful run of brewing with extract and hops etc over many years I suddenly started to get infections so gave up in despair. The smell and taste left little doubt about the diagnosis! That was 15 years ago and now having more time on my hands I have resumed the hobby and so far have had two failures which might have been down to infection or could have been attributable to other factors. What I would say is that those of us coming at this with little or no chemical knowledge will rely on books written by experts and the one I used printed 40 years ago seemed to envisage frequent s.g. checks, scraping off the detritus from the inside of the FV and therefore by implication frequent lifting of the lid. Obviously by adopting the opposite approach thanks to more enlightened thinking and advice on here I am now enjoying the hobby again but would observe that a little paranoia on the subject is hard to shake off.

 

[Obadiah Boondoggle]

It was Robinsons in Stockport - I used to be a brewery tour guide there

and saw it happen

 

[ssashton]

I don't really understand the argument here. At home you can do what you want. In a commercial brewery it's a totally different matter. Just look at the recent fuss with labelling allergens clearly on food packaging. It can literally kill people and that's just the packaging. Among the UK supermarkets we a see dozen product recalls per week mostly due to infection or labelling. They don't throw profit down the toilet for nothing, this stuff's important.

I did have a genuine infection and then I imagined a couple more as it made me hyper sensitive. I started to notice smells I didn't before. I threw out 40L of probably good beer!

If you use StarSan or similar on everything that touches your beer, it'll probably be okay but that doesn't mean no micro-organisms exist in your beer. Just that they are very few and hopefully don't impact taste.

I've more recently been discovering what a big impact oxygen can have on pale highly hopped beers. It was my first instinct after a genuine infection to assume infection caused my IPA to go dark and taste super bitter. Having changed to closed transfers I now realise the huge factor oxygen plays, especially in highly hopped pale beers.