I would also get some PET bottles to save weight,and post a couple out to someone who is good at tasting beer...it's not that expensive...I recently posted a couple of glass 500ml and it cost around £5..
Thank you @Galena for your time in reading and replying.I have read somewhere advice not to put the lid on after the boil until the wort gets below 70C to avoid the risk of DMS, I have no idea if this is good advice but I usually only partially cover until below 70C as habit now.
It is generally recommended that the temperature of the yeast or starter is lower than the temperature of the wort when pitching as the other way round can stress the yeast and you risk off flavours so I am now always careful to do this, at least this is the case when using a starter but for rehydrated dry yeast Im not sure but certainly won't hurt.
Seems like you have your fermentation well controlled.
Mostly MJ (various), but one brew with CML Beoir and a couple with S-04. Full details in my Brewdays thread.I have to ask What yeasts do you use? for example I have found CML yeasts I have made have all been much worse than an equivalent I made with a better yeast..
I would be careful about spreading this kind of misinformation. Have a look at post #11 in the same thread where even AJ Delange, a proponent of homeopathic mineral levels, calls Martin's post nonsense.Read Martin's comment here in the second post Crs
I have had this taste / smell thing when I have diluted tap water with bottled spring water. So not excluding tap water completely, but certainly reducing the possible impact?Reading that you notice the background taste across all styles, I would be pointing the finger of blame at the water.
Water is your constant ingredient. Buy some RO water to make a brew and see how that goes.
I have done a couple of brews with Fermentis S-04 and CML Beoir with (I think) the same results.Also MJ yeasts..... maybe try fermentis for a few batches and see if that helps too. MJ yeasts have been very problematic for me.
I may need to do this, but I've only been brewing a year and so I've only done about 10 brews and I'm pretty sure there are chaps on here that have been using their kit for years (I do, however, understand about cleanliness though - so I'm not dismissing this advice)I would also recommend a very deep clean of all your equipment and fresh sanitization. Fermenters, bottling bucket, bottles and replace all your tubing and bottling wand. Use a bleach solution if you always use star-san or a different sanitizer like iodophor. And scrub everything. Diastaticus has done this to me before, tastes great out of the fermenter and then in the bottles it homogenizes flavours.
I don't use StarSan. I use Harris SureSan, which was sold to me by the LHBS. I mix a teaspoon in a litre or so of warm water and let it dissolve. I use this for everything after the boil, spoons, taps, rubber seals, tubing, thermometer, hydrometer, FV, lid etc etc. i know it doesn't last more then an hour or so, so it's rarely, if ever, kept longer than that.If you do use star San and keep it around for a while replace it and use distilled water. I noticed with hard water you tend to get above the working pH much quicker than RO or distilled.
Those plastic taps are always fully dissembled and cleaned after and before each use, and sanitised prior to fitting in the FV. (Although, to be fair, I do not boil)edit: forgot also spigots! disassemble, deep scrub and boil. These are major problem areas.
Now then..... this.....Store bottles cold as soon as refermentation is complete, usually in two weeks or less. Cold storage is probably more important than reducing oxygen in my opinion.
@Dads_Ale - Happy to swap and go through the brew day - I appreciate your offer, thanks. May have to wait a few weeks though . . .Hi, I’d be happy to do a beer swap as I have just brewed a bitter with Beoir yeast.
I am just down the road South of Didcot and enjoy a drive out at the weekend so would be happy to drop off and have a chat through your process.
My water starts off about 180ppm and after CRS (depending on which brew we're taking about and additions) comes down to somewhere between 70-115ppm. I know that's not pH, but I don't have a pH meter. I just know my Alk is high and needs to be reduced to approximate the style I'm brewing.Reading through the thread I would agree with foxy and the rest regarding your water. I had the same problem before I started treating water. What I had actually done before treatment was to add aciduated malt to the grain bill which in turn drove my pH down and did improve the beer. I still add it now as well as water treatment but it reduces the amount of salts and acid acid required.
I have cold crashed a couple where they are lighter brews. Stouts and the hefe I didn’t bother.Do you cold crash before bottling? Never done it myself but I believe it drops a lot of material out of suspension including yeast. If it's just the yeast giving the taste cold crashing should have an effect I would think. For 10L batches are you using 11g dry yeast?
Great idea. Thanks.On the equipment side, a simple way of just ruling out the water and the fermentation equipment in one go, without buying any new gear could be to buy one or two bottles of 5L mineral water and brew 1 gallon final volume with the bottled water and use the empty 5L bottle as the fermenter, with the lid on but loose, it's what I've been using for the past few brews and it's worked well, I dont even need to sanitize the FV
It was less the carbing temperature, more the lack of the final cool conditioning phase I was concerned about. The last ‘2’, if you will.I condition my bottles at the fermentation temp about 17-18 C, I doubt going to 22 C would have any impact.
I have. I only lurk on their bulletin board system. Plus with C19 there hasn’t been any meet ups. They all seem very serious (I know brewing is a serious business) and frankly I’m a bit intimidated as they all seem to be academic university types (it’s based in Oxford), but I should MTFU if I want to improve my brews.Have you got a home brew club close by which you could join, they will soon tell you what could be wrong.
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