Salut ! Highjacking the first comment to answer a few questions I read : 1) Nope, Starsan isn't available in average supermarkets. 2) We did sanitise everything except the fermentor itself, which we presumed (perhaps wrongly) that it would be clean. 3) We did the elongated mash as we wanted the starch for body and as much flavour as possible but didn't need to "mash" the malt extract 4) We boiled the fruit peel to ensure we got the bitterness from the grapefruit and that bacteria were killed. Only went in at the end so plenty of flavour and aroma in there. 5) The water we used for the airlock, and for the yeast dilution, was bottled. 6) As for now it is a suspected Lactobacillus infection, very sour. Not related to any esters or bleach issues.
Thanks for letting us know what you did! The fermenter should be clean, the water inside has to be bacteria free so it shouldnt be that. All i can presume is the excess of starch. One of my bad brews was when i was still doing extract kits, i added about a kilo of oats with no mash just boiling for sanitation. It was later i found out bacteria such as lactobacillus thrive on the unconverted starches. Basically it creates a gourmet banquet for the bacteria
If it is infected with Lactobacillus; I would bottle some of it in a sterile bottle with a cork (to allow for micro oxygenation), and let it sit for 6 months. Certain Lactobacillus strains are used for making sour beers like Saison (seasonal) beers. Many of the Saison beers also conform to the non-traditional 'hop' methods, like spices etc, which you did. I think your contamination could derive from many places; brewing is as clean as working with milk (almost). Also, an off-flavour could be from the sanitiser you made, which I'll bet money on, chlorine and beer don't work together at all, and bleach has a lot of chlorine. The chlorine creates chlorophenol.
1) You can't buy StarSan in EU. 2) You have to sanitize everything which have contact with wort after boiling. 3) Starch in beer is big problem for it resistance to contamination. Better option is adding lactose if you want body in beer (but it will be slighty sweet). Or use apropriate strain of yeast. 4)Boiling peels removed some flavor from it. Good option is soak peel in strong alcohol and add all to beer after fermentation. 5) I think that's ok. I didn't have any problem with purity of bottled water but maybe I'm lucky. 6) So not bad, I like sour beers with Lacto (for example Berliner Weisse, Lichtenhainer). You can drink it straight or add juice. Best option is to add fruits after main fermentation.
Hi Alex, I'm concerned about the time it took from the boiling mash to the moment you added the yeast. As you know the faster the better, however on the video, it seems you waited for the mash to cool down, even though you added some water to hurry the process reaching a temperature of 50°C, I assume from that point you waited until it had reached 21°C. Did the waiting process occur at room temperature? How long did it take? You need to keep in mind that many bacteria thrive between 10°C and 45°C especially in a nourishing environment such as mash. So, even if you added loads of yeast some bacteria might have a head start growthwise, leading to a mixture of yeast and bacteria in your beer. I would recommend cooling down as fast as possible (steering in an ice-cold water bath to speed up the cooling process until you reached the required temperature. And to maximize the chances of the yeast overtaking over any other unwanted bacteria, I would create a "starter" by boosting the yeast with a little sugar before adding it to the mash.) I also have another question: Brewers use malt for flavour but also for enzyme activity. As you used wheat without any malted barley, the required enzyme (beta amylase and alpha amylase ) where not available. I know you added sugar so there was plenty of food for the yeasts but why bother with the 45°C temperature and 70°C temperature as those are temperatures used to enhance the activity of the enzymes mentioned above?
@@matthewsaive7035 I would agree with your thoughts on eliminating the temperature rests. If malt extract had "diastatic power" and the ability to convert starch to sugar the rests would be the thing to do to help convert some of the starches in the wheat for fermenting. beersmith.com/blog/2010/01/04/diastatic-power-and-mashing-your-beer/ I am not, however, convinced that a high starch content led to the infection, there are many high starch content beers on the market that aren't infected. I'm still convinced the infection came from other sources, possibly the long cooldown or a piece of equipment that wasn't properly sanitized?
ok, homebrewer here with nearly a hundred brews down and a big fan of your videos. first thing that i noticed, you used shredded wheat, that's fine you can use wheat in beers obviously however when using barley and wheat grains you get enzymes which give diastatic power which converts the starches to sugar ( which is why brewers dont need to use malt extract ) by using shredded wheat you've added a bunch of starch...that wont get converted to sugar because you dont have the enzymes in processed cereals... essentially wasting the 45/60 mins you spent soaking it which would usually be spent waiting for the conversion. That extra starch speeds up any bacteria growth/beer spoilage. Second and actually most important above all else, sanitation sanitation sanitation, bleach, baby bottle sterilising tablets.... anything! just get it sterile! even with basic slap dash sterilisation i've only ever had about 3 infected beers and they weren't the undrinkable kind. if you want my humble advice, stick with just the malt extract, get herbs like rosemary ( popular in herbal beers ) instead of hops for the bitterness, if you're going to use orange peel, dont boil it! you'll lose the flavor/aroma, just stick it in the boiling liquid to sterilise and kill the heat ( add it right at the end basically ) same with the corriander seeds. i'd LOVE to see you get this right, make that supermarket only beer baby!
Yes to all of the above. If you really want to mash your wheat and oats then look in the baking section of the store for diastatic malt powder (it is typically powdered malted barley) which is a sometimes-used ingredient in bread baking. Add that to your mash water to get conversion of your starch to sugar. Buy some iodine and use that to check for conversion. Iodine turns black in the presence of starch.
Did you sanitise all the airlock parts? You could use baby bottle sanitiser rather than bleach. The brand in the UK is Milton. It should make things less scary!
Bleach in the bottles you buy is already pretty dilute and diluting it further means it’s safe to use as long as you’re not using like chemist grade industrial bleach
@Alex You really shouldn't use chlorine based products for sanitising when you make beer. If you don't rinse really really well the fermentation can produce chlorophenols from the bleach. A sort of medicinal flavour like TCP ( I think that's actually French so maybe you know it.) I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't what happened to you. It has to me. How did Jonny describe the flavour? If you want something from the supermarket try the oxy bleach products usually sold as stain removers. They contain sodium percarbonate or something similar that releases hydrogen peroxide when put into water. I've been using that for years when making cider.
Alex, if you want any brewing advice, I'm sure you have a bunch of professional brewers as subscribers. Including me! You mostly have a handle on the basic process, and I'm sure in the future you'll use or build proper equipment and ingredients, but here are a couple of tips based on this video. Using bleach is not advisable, nor adding non-boiled water to the boiled wort. The bleach (especially unmeasured like that) will need to be rinsed, unless you want it to taste like bleach. This sort of defeats the purpose of using it as a sanitizer. From a grocert store, you'd have been better off with a vinegar solution, then rinse that out of the fermenter with a little bit of the wort you made. The non-boiled water might have brought unwanted microorganisms with it, and also potential chemicals (unless it was reserved bottled water. In the mash, you didn't have any amylase available to the wheat starch, which would normally be present from the malted barley. The malt extract will not have active enzymes. Using some bread flour would have actually been a good way to get some amylase (from the malted barley used in most bread flour blends) and also some extra wheat starch. Trying a cereal that had some malted barley in it would have helped too. And of course proper brewers yeast is a must. You didn't show your yeast rehydration process...Did you use boiled/cooled water? Homebrewing is a deep rabbit hole of a hobby, so I'll stop there. It's all about baby steps, and there's too much to brewing science to apply all at once your first time correctly. Also, while you did successfully make a 3-piece airlock, next time try a blowoff tube for a much cleaner, hot glue free airlock. Simply drill a hole in the cap (or use a drilled stopper/bung in the future when using a carboy) and place a sanitized plastic tube through the hole and into an adjacent container of sanitizer. This will also allow any foam from fermentation somewhere to go without compromising the beer or blowing the bung off of your fermenter. Your channel is great, and as an engineer/brewer/food science guy it's right up my alley. Word of caution: You will probably get addicted to homebrewing....Cheers!
A couple of thoughts on this: - the airlock was very full which may have introduced water back down the pipe. - you need to be very careful with using bleach even at such high dilution. You could have used your scales to measure 4ml of bleach much more accurately. a detergent that cleans with oxygen could work better for this, or even just vodka would probably do the job! - you mention in part 1 the spiceiness imparted by witbeer yeasts. The flavour you were looking for was clove, as generally wheat beer yeasts provide clove (low temp fermentation) and banana (high temp fermentation) flavours. If you did have a healthy fermentation it's unlikely that you had an infection. It's more likely that off flavours were imparted by the guesswork in your use of bleach. If you had an infection it would have been clear at fermentation stage.
I barely sanitize anything and even re-use the same yeast every week. NEVER really sanitize my airlock for very good reasons, IT NEVER TOUCHES the beer and every time I produce crystal clear delicious tasting beer. These guys added cool water to chill the beer, the whole point of the boil is to de-oxygenate the wort to reduce chance of infection, then they start moving the wort to the fermenter before it's cool enough. Never a good idea. I have no idea what their beer tasted like, but if it doesn't have hops, it generally doesn't taste like beer and it can taste like it's bad when infact your're just not used to the flavour.
Alex! Great vid! I have a background in microbiology and just wanted to mention some contamination risks: 1. Waterlock does not seem sanitized and handled with human hands. 2. No boiled water for cooling. 3. Yeast open to air in Pre-culture. General advice: 1. Work with gloves, especially when handling the screw top of the waterlock that faces the inside of the bottle. 2. Don't overfill the lock. 3. Anything that is decontaminated should be handled on a clean surface (wipe with alcohol). 4. Handle airflow. It is incredible how much having a camping stove/Bunsen burner on the table prevents bacteria from falling from hands/face into cleaned areas. In a radius of about 40cm around the burner, airflow will be pulled from the sides and pushed up an away from your clean things. Hope some of this might help! Good luck with the next batch.
I’m a college student in the United States. I love watching your videos while I make pizza rolls and ramen at 3am. You give me hope that I can make kickass food some day with enough effort and attention.
Ouaaaaiiiss Alex jet'aime ! Thanks for making beer an accessible topic for people! I am a homebrewer and I've been waiting so long (like 6 months...) for my favorite UA-camrs to cover brewing! Joshua Weissman (you should collab with him!) and now you as well, truly amazing :D merci pour tout ce que tu fais !
Alex, one of your best qualities is your determination. You always share your failures and show yourself trying over and over. This is such a great example to make for people because success rarely comes on the first try!
I accidentally made apple sider this way. I ate some bread, then i took a sip of applejuice straight out of the bottle and closed it. And forgot it. 4 months later i found it, opened it and then it smelled good so I curiously tasted it. Really good, so I finished the bottle and was drunk. Weirdest drunk ever aswell... i think it was hella strong
I’ve been waiting for this episode! So excited to see the final product at the end of the series. I would love to see you make a bagel series in the future Alex! I think you would have fun with that. 🥯
Hey Alex, Just wanted to thank you for the great content I have been seeing for the last 2 years and for all the inspiration you have given me so far. Salut de La Hollande!
Thank you for showing us your failures, Alex. It is our failures that make us better people when we are able to look back at them and then do something better. Learning from our failures makes us mighty! Cheers!
@@mark347347 well the balloon forms a seal around the top. I suggest using a fine needle. So when the pressure goes up "burp" is released and that pressure left behind keeps air out. Just make sure to fully seal the bottom of the balloon around the neck of your bottle
@@freshlysaltedfishing8500 Yes. You take a normal baloon poke about 10 holes with a needle and then put around the top ou the bottle that you intend to ferment. The idea is that the carbon dioxide from the fermentation will escape from the holes but the air won't go in. When the baloon is filled the fermatation is happening.
When the wort is cool enough for the yeast, just pour the powered yeast into the fermenter, it will successfully start from that. The extra steps of hydrating/etc are additional sources of contamination. For 'Colonial Hops' (American colonies had a period where they could not get European hops) you can boil pine tree needles like Norway pine, just don't use blue spruce. Airlock can be the bottle cap with a tight fit hole for a vinyl tube where the other end sits in a dish that covers the end of the tube in water.
If yeast takes over quickly I think it's hard to get an infection actually. Dust in the air is the biggest vector of infection I also believe. Vacuum carpeting often for less dust.
ginger beer is easier to make . one gallon spring water 4 ounces fresh grated ginger 1 pound sugar one packet of bread yeast bring water to a boil with the grated ginger and the pound of sugar let it steep at a lower temperature for about 30 minutes . strain out the fresh ginger ( I use this to make cookies ) let it cool to room temperature add yeast put it all back in your spring water bottle . put a small hole in the cap or use an airlock . in four days you will have ginger beer with alcohol , but it tastes better after a week . love your vid , better luck next time .
As it comes to the sanitiser, try to look for sodium percarbonate based products. In europe they are sometimes sold in supermarkets as active oxygen washing detergents and are perfectly suitable for sanitizing home brewery equipment. You make a great piece of work with the videos btw. Keep it up!
It looks like your fermentation airlock is missing a lid. The lid of an airlock is important in preventing contamination of the water inside it. If the water gets contaminated, it can, as surprising as it may seem, make its way into the main vessel. If the water in an airlock is contaminated, then the bubbling that disturbs that water can release airborne microbes, or even splash into the main vessel, depending on the design. It doesn't take much for an infection to spread. You need a lid to shield the airlock from open airflow and particles that could fall in.
Alex, try vinegar for sanitizing and some type of clean alcohol, such as vodka for sterilizing the added ingredients (peels, coriander, etc.). When brewers add things like dry spice/coffee beans/cocao nibs, they are always meticulously sanitized first. My suspicion is the infection was introduced in those steps. Afterthought: was the added water used to cool boiled first? Perhaps use an external cooling method such as a second container of ice water to half sink the hot mash water in.
Easy airlock - Tygon tube attached to the cap, with s loop hanging downward, partially filled with water. My father used this setup years ago to make hard cider.
I've been homebrewing for about 3 years now, I brew cider and lately, I've been using supermarket ingredients to brew, for cider the basics are %100 apple juice and anything else is for flavor balancing. I use a mixture of spices to give the yeast nutrients and I would be happy to help you if you plan on cider, It's a very simple thing to make so you can make a very high-quality product with shop-bought ingredients
Another old home-brewer here (intermediate experience though): People often seem to underestimate how clean things need to be. (I know these guys are experienced, so I don't mean you specifically; But, even the best can get sloppy.) 1.) I see below that you said you did not sanitize the fermentor, so yup, that's probably it. Since it's going to be in contact with the beer the longest, this is probably the most important thing to sanitize. If you had the cap off from time to time, and poked around the rim with your fingers and so on, it will not be clean enough even if it was from the start. 2.) Did you sanitize the mug you poured the yeast in when mixing with water? And did you handle the cap with a straw (airlock) alot after sanitizing it, and so on. 3.) How did you take the temperature before pouring in the yeast? These are my best guesses, but keep it up, and thanks for always great videos!
`You need unscented bleach, if it contains perfume in the ingredients it will not work for beer. It also takes about 15 min to sterilize something with that solution, and it's preferable to do it with warm water. Look out for those white plastic cups, they are cheap but porous and most likely the culprits of any infection, like when you started your yeast. Also, clean everything with soap and water first, thoroughly! I have used bleach to sterilize the stuff in a batch of beer and it worked, you just need to be extra careful and thorough. Hope the next one comes ok!
@Gobblarr bleach will kill almost everything yes, but the chlorine in bleach creates a known off flavour in beer called chlorophenol. You can smell it usually, if the beer smells like a medicine cabinet, or band aids, or almost medicinally - that is chlorophenol in beer.
So couple things: The fermentation process is a race for dominance inside the liquid, if yeast wins the battle you are less likely to have infection. Hops have anti-bacterial properties; so boiling with hops allows an for an environment that's more geared towards yeast growth. This is one of the reasons hops have been used in brewing for so long. Yeast does not need to be made into a slurry or hydrated before hand. Was the cup and spoon sanitised?
Alex! There is a much simpler way to create an airlock. You can put a latex glove on your bottle and when the fermentation gas will go out it will just inflate the glove. So you will have not much pressure in fermentation tank and no outside air is going in.
This is why all brewers become fanatical about sanitation. It is heart-breaking to go to all the effort and end up with stuff that ends up on the compost pile.
Interestingly enough cbd weed isn't illegal in Germany where I live, so you could buy that and i think cbd is both 'heat activated' (i won't bore you with the details) and fat soluble, so if it's even nearly as bitter as hops, it would be pretty interesting. Sidenote: Weed is partly bred for flavour so it might introduce some nice aromas
It’s very weird that it got infected. I have brew around 50 L wine from bottled grape juice in plastic containers WITHOUT an airloc and they always turned out fine. I highly doubt yeast was the problem. Self made airlock looks worse. Also people had done beer without this kinda sanitation knowledge just 100 years ago lol
Would recommend a no-rinse acid based sanitizer, in a spray bottle it makes things much easier to get clean! Since there is no hops, I wonder if this would be more of a gruit rather than a beer? Keep at it Alex, love watching you take on new challenges!
I think the issue you had with infection of the beer might have been the hot glue you used . Fermentation gives off gases and heat , maybe enough heat to break the hot glue seal and allow air to get in .... just a therory . Also hot glue has a hard time bonding and staying glues to some kinds of plastics ... I hope you try again this is a really cool idea and I think you guys can do it , so dont give up... Try again...
A technique that has been tried and worked: put a large (microwaved dry to sterilize) over the top of the fermentation bottle. (Yes, you can get balloons at the grocery store). If the balloon gets too full of CO2, let some escape every couple of days.
Toasted pearl barley... white sugar ... bread yeast and gruit (flavour) will give you a decent beer. I know, I have done it. Dry toasted orange peel and sage or rosemary works well. White Sugar converts to about 50% of it's weight to alcohol to give you a rough idea. 100grms of sugar 50ml of alcohol, it's not an exact science but will tell you if you have about 3% or 7% of alcohol and bread yeast is probably good up to about 10 to 13%.
homebrewer here with nearly a hundred brews down and a big fan of your videos. first thing that i noticed, you used shredded wheat, that's fine you can use wheat in beers obviously however when using barley and wheat grains you get enzymes which give diastatic power which converts the starches to sugar ( which is why brewers dont need to use malt extract ) by using shredded wheat you've added a bunch of starch...that wont get converted to sugar because you dont have the enzymes in processed cereals... essentially wasting the 45/60 mins you spent soaking it which would usually be spent waiting for the conversion. That extra starch speeds up any bacteria growth/beer spoilage. Second and actually most important above all else, sanitation sanitation sanitation, bleach, baby bottle sterilising tablets.... anything! just get it sterile! even with basic slap dash sterilisation i've only ever had about 3 infected beers and they weren't the undrinkable kind. if you want my humble advice, stick with just the malt extract, get herbs like rosemary ( popular in herbal beers ) instead of hops for the bitterness, if you're going to use orange peel, dont boil it! you'll lose the flavor/aroma, just stick it in the boiling liquid to sterilise and kill the heat ( add it right at the end basically ) same with the corriander seeds. i'd LOVE to see you get this right, make that supermarket only beer baby!
The first beer I ever made was made with all-purpose flour corn sugar oats and rice it tasted really good but it was very cloudy because of the all-purpose flour if I were to recreate it I would make it either without the flower or I would let it set longer so I can get it clearer I'm not sure if the starch is converted or not cuz I didn't even know that that was thing most of my experience was with making Mead and wine but it turned out really good it was smooth and had a nice head to it and tasted good
COOL FAST AND COVERED. Letting the wort cool down on it's own (not covered and slowly), was asking for bacteria to find it. Cover the pot, put it in your bathtub, with ice water and move it around. Occasionally you can stir the wort with a SANITIZED spoon. You might need to change out the liquid in your bathtub once.
I’ve never brewed with regular bread yeast from the store. I’ve also never brewed without hops. Regular grocery store malt extract can probably work to some extent though you probably won’t get the enzyme power from it that you would normally get if you used malted barley and did the initial steeping process. No real need to use distilled water if you’re going to boil your water because the chlorine or fluoride will evaporate off pretty quickly in the boil. Also, try to use ingredients without preservatives in them because those preservatives are designed to keep bacteria and yeast from growing. I knowingly made a Cider out of many bottles of unfermented cider that contained preservatives. I eventually got a fermentation but it took a long time. I was lucky in that it didn’t get contaminated with other things. It turned out to be pretty good.
I can’t really talk shit because I’ve never done it but using grocery store materials might be like trying to make prison wine. It’s not going to be as good possibly. I feel for all the people who don’t have access to a homebrew store. However, if you can mail order it, that would be good. Brewing yeast seems to be a lot more specialized then baking yeast. A lot of the different yeast strains can put off different flavors and have different performance. Using yeast specialized to brew what kind of beer you want would be optimal. I think hops are pretty indispensable but back in the day, before hops, monks used to make Gruit without hops. This is because they didn’t yet know that hops had this preservative quality. Soo, maybe hops aren’t necessary. But then I would not say that it’s beer.… And neither would Germany.
That airlock exposes the water to the air in the room way too much. That could be the problem. Fermentation airlocks have shields, or other designs to reduce that as much as possible.
@@BeeRich33 It's really not. A good airlock has a shield above it so that nothing can fall into the water to contaminate it. This didn't have that, so the water *very* easily could have been contaminated with any microbes in the ambient air. Avoiding contact with airflow in the room is important.
I really wish we could have seen photos of the fermentation or the finished beer even if it was a failure. Sometimes that can give really good information as to what went wrong!
to make an easy airlock grab a balloon, poke a hole with a thin needle and cover the mouth of the fermentation chamber with it (you may need to cut the mouth of the balloon). when the CO2 pressure rises the balloon expands and the hole opens, venting gas. as the gas pressure drops, the rubber contracts, closing the hole and preventing oxygen from coming in. tested with homemade wine, it works.
Next time add yeast to previously boiled and chilled water in a regular glass , boiling works as a sanitation pretty well . Apply some pure alcohol to your hands and parts that cannot be boiled and have contact with a beer after boiling
Postum (coffee substitute made from roasted grain) might be good for a stout or Porter. Wheatena has roasted grain. Whole wheat pasta might be interesting.
Make your airlock out of glass. Think old beer bottle with the end ground off (there's tutorials out there), old wine bottle cork (easy to source, takes a drillhole relatively easy), glass straw, shot glass. put straw in cork, put cork in beer bottle, drop shotglass over straw. insert whole contraption on top of fermenter. Duck tape or glue shut. edit: Why? Glass is much easier to disinfect, and apart from the cork (could go with those newfangled rubber ones), it's non-porous.
There's plenty of things that could be changed up here pretty easily, not sure if any of those would have a material impact on the end product, or reduce the chances of infection. Instead of making an airlock, .you could ferment in a bucket with glad wrap covering it. If the supermarket already sells malt extract, just use that as the malt source, maybe a bit of sugar as well, but the cereals are all highly processed, and without any other enzymes from other grains to break them down, they're probably not going to add much to the beer (would be something to experiment with, what kind of cereals add desired flavours and fermentable sugars). I kind of wonder about the purity of that yeast. If it's intended to be used for baking, then it may not need to be free from other, non-S. cerevisiae strains. As others have suggested in the previous video, a better source of yeast would be a bottle conditioned beer, Coopers in Australia for example, take the yeast from the end of that bottle (bottles), and use that instead. Hops are always going to be hard to replace. Going for that wit style of orange peel and coriander is quite a good thought. There may be some orange or lemon extract/essence available in the supermarket as well to really amp up the bitterness to "beer levels", without any off flavours from boiling ingredients like those for extended periods.
As always, thanks for taking us along through your journey. Some thoughts... An infection was mentioned... But no details, no images. You usually let us know what the symptoms are when things don't go as planned. He mentioned that he got some CO2 in the bottle, but there is no mention as to how was it bottled, or conditioned. Was it a flavor that led to this conclusion? You used bread yeast, so is it really infected, or did you get some esters in there that weren't favorable to the wort blend? I usually use StarSan solution in my bubbler to prevent the possibility of 'growing' something and infecting the beer from above. Keeping with the theme of only using store bought items, you could have achieved the same using gin or vodka in place of the StarSan. Also, there's a cover on the bubbler I use to prevent 'things' from falling into the bubbler. Your is sort of open to the environment. Insects, or dust, or... could have fallen into that water which then made it's way into the fermenter. If you have healthy fermentation (which he said there was), CO2 is going to be pushing everything away from the fermentation chamber, throught the bubbler, and out. So... If something got in via the straw, it would have been near the end of the fermentation once things settled down. It's also possible that with the healthy fermentation that the yeast froth came through the bubbler. If it just sat there in the cup (of unsanitized water), it could become infected, and make it's way back into the fermenter. I agree with the thoughts below... you added water after the boil. Granted it was bottled water, but you don't know if the infection was something you added, or if infective material was in the water already, or the bubbler (was it sanitized?). Was your fermentor sanitized? Was the upside down cup in the bubbler sanitized? Where was the beer stored during fermentation? Was it consistently the correct temp throughout the fermentation? It is a possibility that if the bottles were not cleaned fully that the infection got in that way too. Beer is fun. Frustrating though. In cooking you know pretty quick if you goofed up. Beer is a hard days work making it, and then a couple of weeks waiting to see if you had good results. More, if you are not kegging (which you are not going to do with store bought items, then you have a bottle conditioning period to wait also. Anyway, goodluck!!! And thanks for your hard work on the channel.
Bread yeast comes from breweries. It's infection rate is low. Pedio/Lacto infection is obvious. Their pitch rate suggests bottling was where the infection came from. He didn't mention flavours at end of primary.
@@BeeRich33 No, I wasn't saying that the yeast was the source of infection. I was saying... We have different strains of yeast for different flavors in the beer, right? I was saying that this would be another off flavor than what they might be expecting as the flavors they were expecting were not there, or, other flavors are there that they weren't expecting.
My guess for the infection is the airlock, or possibly that they didn't use pre boiled water for the yeast slurry. I use star san in my airlock just to keep it clean, if they used tap water and there was any suck-back then it could introduce a bunch of bacteria.
I spent years brewing beer at home and never had a single batch spoiled by bacterial infection. There’s only one rule: *everything* that comes in contact with your beer after the boil needs to be sanitised. Absolutely everything. If you forgot to sanitise the airlock or that cup where you rehydrated the yeast, that might be it. Some other things to keep in mind: 1. mashing oats and wheat without any malted barley might not be a good idea. You probably didn’t have enough alpha- and beta-amylase to convert those starches into sugars. Yeast can’t eat starches, but bacteria can - that would mean a wort full of bacteria food. You’d probably have more success skipping those grains and using just the malt extract. 2. It looked like you used a heavy amount of malt extract. That would mean a lot of sugars, which would ferment and become more alcohol. You used bread yeast, which dies when the alcohol concentration reaches ~3.5%. If you still have sugars left at this stage, you’re allowing contaminants to propagate without the yeast competing. You definitely want to calculate the exact amount of malt extract you need in order to keep the alcohol content below 3.5% (or get a better yeast)
I wish you would have done a time lapse on the fermentation. I have made lots of mead, without any extreme steps to sanitize, never a problem. I don't even heat the honey or water.
Your airlock doesn't need to be so complicated, you can run a tube(drinking straws maybe) from the fermenter into into a tub of water and it will do the same thing. Good luck! Clean clean clean!
Alex it simply means that at some point something was not properly sanitized is all. You made beer but it was just "skunky" due to some foreign element getting into the mix. Look at it like this your "carboy" did not explode or anything like that and the items you got from the grocery store worked.
Breathing mask to catch flying spit in case there is any. All of the water used in the process has to be boiled fist. Dust/evaporation cap for the air lock. Wash your hands up to the elbows, use cheese cloths or similar to cover the liquids when they aren't being handled - I doubt the wild yeasts in London would be beneficial to your process.
Try mead next, it's far less fiddly. Suggest using starsan instead of using bleach, again far less fiddly. Fruit added to a mead pre-fermentation also adds nutrients the yeast need that the honey lacks. Our fruit infused mead turned out drinkable but I lament using champagne yeast, it's strong to the point of being mildly offensive. Another note, one batch we skipped the fruit in favor of plain raisins and added crushed butterscotch candy, this was a mistake that left it bitter for some reason.
Salut ! Highjacking the first comment to answer a few questions I read :
1) Nope, Starsan isn't available in average supermarkets.
2) We did sanitise everything except the fermentor itself, which we presumed (perhaps wrongly) that it would be clean.
3) We did the elongated mash as we wanted the starch for body and as much flavour as possible but didn't need to "mash" the malt extract
4) We boiled the fruit peel to ensure we got the bitterness from the grapefruit and that bacteria were killed. Only went in at the end so plenty of flavour and aroma in there.
5) The water we used for the airlock, and for the yeast dilution, was bottled.
6) As for now it is a suspected Lactobacillus infection, very sour. Not related to any esters or bleach issues.
Thanks for letting us know what you did! The fermenter should be clean, the water inside has to be bacteria free so it shouldnt be that. All i can presume is the excess of starch. One of my bad brews was when i was still doing extract kits, i added about a kilo of oats with no mash just boiling for sanitation. It was later i found out bacteria such as lactobacillus thrive on the unconverted starches. Basically it creates a gourmet banquet for the bacteria
If it is infected with Lactobacillus; I would bottle some of it in a sterile bottle with a cork (to allow for micro oxygenation), and let it sit for 6 months. Certain Lactobacillus strains are used for making sour beers like Saison (seasonal) beers. Many of the Saison beers also conform to the non-traditional 'hop' methods, like spices etc, which you did. I think your contamination could derive from many places; brewing is as clean as working with milk (almost). Also, an off-flavour could be from the sanitiser you made, which I'll bet money on, chlorine and beer don't work together at all, and bleach has a lot of chlorine. The chlorine creates chlorophenol.
1) You can't buy StarSan in EU.
2) You have to sanitize everything which have contact with wort after boiling.
3) Starch in beer is big problem for it resistance to contamination. Better option is adding lactose if you want body in beer (but it will be slighty sweet). Or use apropriate strain of yeast.
4)Boiling peels removed some flavor from it. Good option is soak peel in strong alcohol and add all to beer after fermentation.
5) I think that's ok. I didn't have any problem with purity of bottled water but maybe I'm lucky.
6) So not bad, I like sour beers with Lacto (for example Berliner Weisse, Lichtenhainer). You can drink it straight or add juice. Best option is to add fruits after main fermentation.
Hi Alex,
I'm concerned about the time it took from the boiling mash to the moment you added the yeast. As you know the faster the better, however on the video, it seems you waited for the mash to cool down, even though you added some water to hurry the process reaching a temperature of 50°C, I assume from that point you waited until it had reached 21°C.
Did the waiting process occur at room temperature?
How long did it take?
You need to keep in mind that many bacteria thrive between 10°C and 45°C especially in a nourishing environment such as mash.
So, even if you added loads of yeast some bacteria might have a head start growthwise, leading to a mixture of yeast and bacteria in your beer.
I would recommend cooling down as fast as possible (steering in an ice-cold water bath to speed up the cooling process until you reached the required temperature. And to maximize the chances of the yeast overtaking over any other unwanted bacteria, I would create a "starter" by boosting the yeast with a little sugar before adding it to the mash.)
I also have another question:
Brewers use malt for flavour but also for enzyme activity.
As you used wheat without any malted barley, the required enzyme (beta amylase and alpha amylase ) where not available.
I know you added sugar so there was plenty of food for the yeasts but why bother with the 45°C temperature and 70°C temperature as those are temperatures used to enhance the activity of the enzymes mentioned above?
@@matthewsaive7035 I would agree with your thoughts on eliminating the temperature rests. If malt extract had "diastatic power" and the ability to convert starch to sugar the rests would be the thing to do to help convert some of the starches in the wheat for fermenting. beersmith.com/blog/2010/01/04/diastatic-power-and-mashing-your-beer/ I am not, however, convinced that a high starch content led to the infection, there are many high starch content beers on the market that aren't infected. I'm still convinced the infection came from other sources, possibly the long cooldown or a piece of equipment that wasn't properly sanitized?
ok, homebrewer here with nearly a hundred brews down and a big fan of your videos. first thing that i noticed, you used shredded wheat, that's fine you can use wheat in beers obviously however when using barley and wheat grains you get enzymes which give diastatic power which converts the starches to sugar ( which is why brewers dont need to use malt extract ) by using shredded wheat you've added a bunch of starch...that wont get converted to sugar because you dont have the enzymes in processed cereals... essentially wasting the 45/60 mins you spent soaking it which would usually be spent waiting for the conversion. That extra starch speeds up any bacteria growth/beer spoilage. Second and actually most important above all else, sanitation sanitation sanitation, bleach, baby bottle sterilising tablets.... anything! just get it sterile! even with basic slap dash sterilisation i've only ever had about 3 infected beers and they weren't the undrinkable kind. if you want my humble advice, stick with just the malt extract, get herbs like rosemary ( popular in herbal beers ) instead of hops for the bitterness, if you're going to use orange peel, dont boil it! you'll lose the flavor/aroma, just stick it in the boiling liquid to sterilise and kill the heat ( add it right at the end basically ) same with the corriander seeds. i'd LOVE to see you get this right, make that supermarket only beer baby!
Correct. I made the same reply before seeing yours.
Yes to all of the above. If you really want to mash your wheat and oats then look in the baking section of the store for diastatic malt powder (it is typically powdered malted barley) which is a sometimes-used ingredient in bread baking. Add that to your mash water to get conversion of your starch to sugar. Buy some iodine and use that to check for conversion. Iodine turns black in the presence of starch.
@@MattKingman today... i learned you can buy distatic malt powder... genius!
@@fryskerider8553 i do 100% agree but you can't buy star san in the supermarket :D
alright now i didn't see the challenge is supposed to be ONLY supermarket stuff. I'd still toss the bleach and find something else to sanitize with.
Keep at it Alex!!! You're on the right track, beer is in your very near future.
I'm just surprised to see you here
@@smokinpumpkin3173 same
@@thechosenone8808 Ditto.
@@smokinpumpkin3173 I'm not, similar interests and Glen has referenced him more than once in his videos.
I actually found Alex thanks to Glen~!
Did you sanitise all the airlock parts?
You could use baby bottle sanitiser rather than bleach. The brand in the UK is Milton. It should make things less scary!
I didn't know about this when we made it. Now I do 😁. I'll keep this in mind.
Bleach in the bottles you buy is already pretty dilute and diluting it further means it’s safe to use as long as you’re not using like chemist grade industrial bleach
@Alex You really shouldn't use chlorine based products for sanitising when you make beer. If you don't rinse really really well the fermentation can produce chlorophenols from the bleach. A sort of medicinal flavour like TCP ( I think that's actually French so maybe you know it.) I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't what happened to you. It has to me. How did Jonny describe the flavour?
If you want something from the supermarket try the oxy bleach products usually sold as stain removers. They contain sodium percarbonate or something similar that releases hydrogen peroxide when put into water. I've been using that for years when making cider.
@@FrenchGuyCooking the tablets used to sterilize baby bottles works great too!
Alex I can send u some for free if you want have in the cupboard
Alex, if you want any brewing advice, I'm sure you have a bunch of professional brewers as subscribers. Including me! You mostly have a handle on the basic process, and I'm sure in the future you'll use or build proper equipment and ingredients, but here are a couple of tips based on this video. Using bleach is not advisable, nor adding non-boiled water to the boiled wort. The bleach (especially unmeasured like that) will need to be rinsed, unless you want it to taste like bleach. This sort of defeats the purpose of using it as a sanitizer. From a grocert store, you'd have been better off with a vinegar solution, then rinse that out of the fermenter with a little bit of the wort you made. The non-boiled water might have brought unwanted microorganisms with it, and also potential chemicals (unless it was reserved bottled water. In the mash, you didn't have any amylase available to the wheat starch, which would normally be present from the malted barley. The malt extract will not have active enzymes. Using some bread flour would have actually been a good way to get some amylase (from the malted barley used in most bread flour blends) and also some extra wheat starch. Trying a cereal that had some malted barley in it would have helped too. And of course proper brewers yeast is a must. You didn't show your yeast rehydration process...Did you use boiled/cooled water? Homebrewing is a deep rabbit hole of a hobby, so I'll stop there. It's all about baby steps, and there's too much to brewing science to apply all at once your first time correctly.
Also, while you did successfully make a 3-piece airlock, next time try a blowoff tube for a much cleaner, hot glue free airlock. Simply drill a hole in the cap (or use a drilled stopper/bung in the future when using a carboy) and place a sanitized plastic tube through the hole and into an adjacent container of sanitizer. This will also allow any foam from fermentation somewhere to go without compromising the beer or blowing the bung off of your fermenter.
Your channel is great, and as an engineer/brewer/food science guy it's right up my alley. Word of caution: You will probably get addicted to homebrewing....Cheers!
He's fine. His pitch rate was aggressive. Bottling we didn't see and it's one of the first things to avoid when homebrewing.
Here's another brewer and brewing engineer ready to help!
Didn't show it, but it looks like you made the airlock after everything else was sterilized, so maybe that was what introduced the bacteria?
Yes, looks like they didn't sterilize the airlock, the funnel and the cup with the yeast in it or some tool used.
@@radry100 Also poured in what looked like tap water to cool it down. Unlikely, but another potential source.
A couple of thoughts on this:
- the airlock was very full which may have introduced water back down the pipe.
- you need to be very careful with using bleach even at such high dilution. You could have used your scales to measure 4ml of bleach much more accurately. a detergent that cleans with oxygen could work better for this, or even just vodka would probably do the job!
- you mention in part 1 the spiceiness imparted by witbeer yeasts. The flavour you were looking for was clove, as generally wheat beer yeasts provide clove (low temp fermentation) and banana (high temp fermentation) flavours.
If you did have a healthy fermentation it's unlikely that you had an infection. It's more likely that off flavours were imparted by the guesswork in your use of bleach. If you had an infection it would have been clear at fermentation stage.
@@ReaperUnreal @radry100 The video also doesn't show the fermenter being sanitized, not saying they didn't but...
I barely sanitize anything and even re-use the same yeast every week. NEVER really sanitize my airlock for very good reasons, IT NEVER TOUCHES the beer and every time I produce crystal clear delicious tasting beer.
These guys added cool water to chill the beer, the whole point of the boil is to de-oxygenate the wort to reduce chance of infection, then they start moving the wort to the fermenter before it's cool enough. Never a good idea.
I have no idea what their beer tasted like, but if it doesn't have hops, it generally doesn't taste like beer and it can taste like it's bad when infact your're just not used to the flavour.
yea...the 2nd installment I've been waiting patiently for!
Alex! Great vid! I have a background in microbiology and just wanted to mention some contamination risks:
1. Waterlock does not seem sanitized and handled with human hands.
2. No boiled water for cooling.
3. Yeast open to air in Pre-culture.
General advice:
1. Work with gloves, especially when handling the screw top of the waterlock that faces the inside of the bottle.
2. Don't overfill the lock.
3. Anything that is decontaminated should be handled on a clean surface (wipe with alcohol).
4. Handle airflow. It is incredible how much having a camping stove/Bunsen burner on the table prevents bacteria from falling from hands/face into cleaned areas. In a radius of about 40cm around the burner, airflow will be pulled from the sides and pushed up an away from your clean things.
Hope some of this might help! Good luck with the next batch.
I’m a college student in the United States. I love watching your videos while I make pizza rolls and ramen at 3am. You give me hope that I can make kickass food some day with enough effort and attention.
I make my pizza rolls with honey butter chili powder garlic salt onion powder hot sauce squeeze garlic and 2 kinds of Parmesan cheese 😂👌🏼
Inspired. Thanks Alex
Love this video. As a homebrewer myself I love the creativity. Thinking out of the box is so much fun. I feel your pain. When things go bad.
I'm kind of happy that it failed, cause this means more beer videos!!
Spoiler alert
I mean: fail - try - again is an old narration pattern, but somehow Alex makes it feel really fresh on UA-cam
Ouaaaaiiiss Alex jet'aime ! Thanks for making beer an accessible topic for people! I am a homebrewer and I've been waiting so long (like 6 months...) for my favorite UA-camrs to cover brewing! Joshua Weissman (you should collab with him!) and now you as well, truly amazing :D merci pour tout ce que tu fais !
Salut Alex!!! Keep it going. We need at least 6 more episodes to get it perfect!!
Alex, one of your best qualities is your determination. You always share your failures and show yourself trying over and over. This is such a great example to make for people because success rarely comes on the first try!
The first video I watched of you was part 1 last night followed by 4 hours of binging more of your videos. I love everything about this channel.
Dude I am so sorry that it didn’t work out properly. So looking forward to seeing you try it again with so success. Good luck for next time.
I accidentally made apple sider this way. I ate some bread, then i took a sip of applejuice straight out of the bottle and closed it. And forgot it. 4 months later i found it, opened it and then it smelled good so I curiously tasted it. Really good, so I finished the bottle and was drunk. Weirdest drunk ever aswell... i think it was hella strong
Dude, you've won the internet !
wow
I’ve been waiting for this episode! So excited to see the final product at the end of the series.
I would love to see you make a bagel series in the future Alex! I think you would have fun with that. 🥯
Hey Alex,
Just wanted to thank you for the great content I have been seeing for the last 2 years and for all the inspiration you have given me so far.
Salut de La Hollande!
Thank you for showing us your failures, Alex. It is our failures that make us better people when we are able to look back at them and then do something better. Learning from our failures makes us mighty! Cheers!
If you poke a balloon a few times it will work as a air lock. The air will come out and no air will come in. I made mead with this technique
Wait. More details please... how??
Thank you much appreciated
@@mark347347 well the balloon forms a seal around the top. I suggest using a fine needle. So when the pressure goes up "burp" is released and that pressure left behind keeps air out. Just make sure to fully seal the bottom of the balloon around the neck of your bottle
@@freshlysaltedfishing8500 Yes. You take a normal baloon poke about 10 holes with a needle and then put around the top ou the bottle that you intend to ferment. The idea is that the carbon dioxide from the fermentation will escape from the holes but the air won't go in. When the baloon is filled the fermatation is happening.
I love your videos. Easily my top 5 youtubers, but I like your stuff twice as much after wine.
0:03 "Whats up guys, it's SALUT welcome back." 😂😂😂
New series: Cooking with Bleach
I'd rather see "Bleaching with Babish", then Alex doing this. just for the Name of the show! ;)
One full bleach cap can sanatize a full gallon of water making it ready for consumption.
You've been watching too much of Chris Ray Gun lol
I could seriously see him doing a full series on this.
Alex, you ponder better than anyone I know!! The small talk/babble is brilliant! (while you ponder that is...)
When the wort is cool enough for the yeast, just pour the powered yeast into the fermenter, it will successfully start from that. The extra steps of hydrating/etc are additional sources of contamination. For 'Colonial Hops' (American colonies had a period where they could not get European hops) you can boil pine tree needles like Norway pine, just don't use blue spruce. Airlock can be the bottle cap with a tight fit hole for a vinyl tube where the other end sits in a dish that covers the end of the tube in water.
What can I say Alex (and chaps) - I feel your pain; having had a bad batch of home brew....it brought a tear to mine eye.
Malt extract added to hot milk is the best. Good to see you in the rainy UK. Also good luck on getting it right, hopefully you'll make great beer.
you can connect a tube from the top of the fermenting vessel that leads to a container with water for the airlock.
What if they're lying and it was so good that they drank it all without you?
Sets yeah maybe it was the best beer ever!
If yeast takes over quickly I think it's hard to get an infection actually. Dust in the air is the biggest vector of infection I also believe. Vacuum carpeting often for less dust.
i love your content. it's so wholesome.
ginger beer is easier to make .
one gallon spring water
4 ounces fresh grated ginger
1 pound sugar
one packet of bread yeast
bring water to a boil with the grated ginger and
the pound of sugar
let it steep at a lower temperature for about
30 minutes .
strain out the fresh ginger ( I use this to make cookies )
let it cool to room temperature
add yeast
put it all back in your spring water bottle .
put a small hole in the cap or use an airlock .
in four days you will have ginger beer with alcohol ,
but it tastes better after a week .
love your vid , better luck next time .
Fantastic!!!! God I love brewing!
As it comes to the sanitiser, try to look for sodium percarbonate based products. In europe they are sometimes sold in supermarkets as active oxygen washing detergents and are perfectly suitable for sanitizing home brewery equipment. You make a great piece of work with the videos btw. Keep it up!
It looks like your fermentation airlock is missing a lid. The lid of an airlock is important in preventing contamination of the water inside it. If the water gets contaminated, it can, as surprising as it may seem, make its way into the main vessel. If the water in an airlock is contaminated, then the bubbling that disturbs that water can release airborne microbes, or even splash into the main vessel, depending on the design. It doesn't take much for an infection to spread. You need a lid to shield the airlock from open airflow and particles that could fall in.
Alex, try vinegar for sanitizing and some type of clean alcohol, such as vodka for sterilizing the added ingredients (peels, coriander, etc.). When brewers add things like dry spice/coffee beans/cocao nibs, they are always meticulously sanitized first. My suspicion is the infection was introduced in those steps. Afterthought: was the added water used to cool boiled first? Perhaps use an external cooling method such as a second container of ice water to half sink the hot mash water in.
You always have some great projects but this one especially catches my interest. Pretty cool dude!
A collaboration with Pasta Grannies for your future pasta episodes would be kinda awesome
Easy airlock - Tygon tube attached to the cap, with s loop hanging downward, partially filled with water. My father used this setup years ago to make hard cider.
You’ll get it right. I’ve watched enough of your videos to know, you are tenacious and fearless. You’ll get it. :)
I've been homebrewing for about 3 years now, I brew cider and lately, I've been using supermarket ingredients to brew, for cider the basics are %100 apple juice and anything else is for flavor balancing. I use a mixture of spices to give the yeast nutrients and I would be happy to help you if you plan on cider, It's a very simple thing to make so you can make a very high-quality product with shop-bought ingredients
Another old home-brewer here (intermediate experience though): People often seem to underestimate how clean things need to be. (I know these guys are experienced, so I don't mean you specifically; But, even the best can get sloppy.) 1.) I see below that you said you did not sanitize the fermentor, so yup, that's probably it. Since it's going to be in contact with the beer the longest, this is probably the most important thing to sanitize. If you had the cap off from time to time, and poked around the rim with your fingers and so on, it will not be clean enough even if it was from the start.
2.) Did you sanitize the mug you poured the yeast in when mixing with water? And did you handle the cap with a straw (airlock) alot after sanitizing it, and so on.
3.) How did you take the temperature before pouring in the yeast?
These are my best guesses, but keep it up, and thanks for always great videos!
Santise the airlock and yeast cup. Try and cool the wort quicker.
Alex ! Cette série promet ! Super fan, hate de voir si ça marche ! :)))
`You need unscented bleach, if it contains perfume in the ingredients it will not work for beer. It also takes about 15 min to sterilize something with that solution, and it's preferable to do it with warm water. Look out for those white plastic cups, they are cheap but porous and most likely the culprits of any infection, like when you started your yeast.
Also, clean everything with soap and water first, thoroughly!
I have used bleach to sterilize the stuff in a batch of beer and it worked, you just need to be extra careful and thorough.
Hope the next one comes ok!
@Gobblarr bleach will kill almost everything yes, but the chlorine in bleach creates a known off flavour in beer called chlorophenol. You can smell it usually, if the beer smells like a medicine cabinet, or band aids, or almost medicinally - that is chlorophenol in beer.
Starting with tea? A GREAT idea! Starting with tea bag tea? Somewhere in London Don Mei is crying.
So couple things:
The fermentation process is a race for dominance inside the liquid, if yeast wins the battle you are less likely to have infection.
Hops have anti-bacterial properties; so boiling with hops allows an for an environment that's more geared towards yeast growth. This is one of the reasons hops have been used in brewing for so long.
Yeast does not need to be made into a slurry or hydrated before hand. Was the cup and spoon sanitised?
Alex! There is a much simpler way to create an airlock. You can put a latex glove on your bottle and when the fermentation gas will go out it will just inflate the glove. So you will have not much pressure in fermentation tank and no outside air is going in.
AAAA I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOUR NEXT VIDEO AND HERE IT IS!! YOU ALWAYS MAKE MY DAY!!
This is why all brewers become fanatical about sanitation. It is heart-breaking to go to all the effort and end up with stuff that ends up on the compost pile.
Especially when it's 5-10 gallons, just throwing away time and money, and beer!
The one time at the University that we ended up with a usable infection was when we unintentionally made beer-vinegar. Success?
You should’ve used weed instead of hops. You can get some in most supermarket parking lots.
cannabis is kin to hops after all lol
That's an expensive waste of bud :( I'm all for combining weed with beer, just... not like that. Lol
Yes, they are in the same family.
@@mattc5157 thats why you use the lower thc producing males my dude.
Interestingly enough cbd weed isn't illegal in Germany where I live, so you could buy that and i think cbd is both 'heat activated' (i won't bore you with the details) and fat soluble, so if it's even nearly as bitter as hops, it would be pretty interesting. Sidenote: Weed is partly bred for flavour so it might introduce some nice aromas
infection might have happened when y'all mixed the yeast in the water in a cup that wasn't sanitized.
With that kind of concentration of yeast?
It’s very weird that it got infected. I have brew around 50 L wine from bottled grape juice in plastic containers WITHOUT an airloc and they always turned out fine. I highly doubt yeast was the problem. Self made airlock looks worse. Also people had done beer without this kinda sanitation knowledge just 100 years ago lol
I love you Alex. You are an inspiration.
1:24 only the Frenchman has the exaggerated pinky
Its from the type of yeast you used, baker yeast has a additive in it that it need for it to keep working
There's no one better to learn about making pasta from, than the Pasta Grannies channel here on youtube.
Ça fait plaisir de te voir avec un stylo plume
Would recommend a no-rinse acid based sanitizer, in a spray bottle it makes things much easier to get clean!
Since there is no hops, I wonder if this would be more of a gruit rather than a beer?
Keep at it Alex, love watching you take on new challenges!
I think the issue you had with infection of the beer might have been the hot glue you used . Fermentation gives off gases and heat , maybe enough heat to break the hot glue seal and allow air to get in .... just a therory . Also hot glue has a hard time bonding and staying glues to some kinds of plastics ... I hope you try again this is a really cool idea and I think you guys can do it , so dont give up... Try again...
I like the Kaweco sport you're using!
A technique that has been tried and worked: put a large (microwaved dry to sterilize) over the top of the fermentation bottle. (Yes, you can get balloons at the grocery store). If the balloon gets too full of CO2, let some escape every couple of days.
Toasted pearl barley... white sugar ... bread yeast and gruit (flavour) will give you a decent beer. I know, I have done it. Dry toasted orange peel and sage or rosemary works well.
White Sugar converts to about 50% of it's weight to alcohol to give you a rough idea. 100grms of sugar 50ml of alcohol, it's not an exact science but will tell you if you have about 3% or 7% of alcohol and bread yeast is probably good up to about 10 to 13%.
I've been a craft brewer for a while. This looks interesting, I could try this recipe with a little more caution
homebrewer here with nearly a hundred brews down and a big fan of your videos. first thing that i noticed, you used shredded wheat, that's fine you can use wheat in beers obviously however when using barley and wheat grains you get enzymes which give diastatic power which converts the starches to sugar ( which is why brewers dont need to use malt extract ) by using shredded wheat you've added a bunch of starch...that wont get converted to sugar because you dont have the enzymes in processed cereals... essentially wasting the 45/60 mins you spent soaking it which would usually be spent waiting for the conversion. That extra starch speeds up any bacteria growth/beer spoilage. Second and actually most important above all else, sanitation sanitation sanitation, bleach, baby bottle sterilising tablets.... anything! just get it sterile! even with basic slap dash sterilisation i've only ever had about 3 infected beers and they weren't the undrinkable kind. if you want my humble advice, stick with just the malt extract, get herbs like rosemary ( popular in herbal beers ) instead of hops for the bitterness, if you're going to use orange peel, dont boil it! you'll lose the flavor/aroma, just stick it in the boiling liquid to sterilise and kill the heat ( add it right at the end basically ) same with the corriander seeds. i'd LOVE to see you get this right, make that supermarket only beer baby!
Awesome loved this!!!
Good that you will focus again on making food. Really miss that. And the music on those videos. Glad that you are going back to that ;)
The first beer I ever made was made with all-purpose flour corn sugar oats and rice it tasted really good but it was very cloudy because of the all-purpose flour
if I were to recreate it I would make it either without the flower or I would let it set longer so I can get it clearer
I'm not sure if the starch is converted or not cuz I didn't even know that that was thing most of my experience was with making Mead and wine but it turned out really good it was smooth and had a nice head to it and tasted good
COOL FAST AND COVERED.
Letting the wort cool down on it's own (not covered and slowly), was asking for bacteria to find it.
Cover the pot, put it in your bathtub, with ice water and move it around. Occasionally you can stir the wort with a SANITIZED spoon.
You might need to change out the liquid in your bathtub once.
6:48 I breathed in cause I thought Alex was asking if I wanted to smell it too, I was instantly betrayed
I’ve never brewed with regular bread yeast from the store. I’ve also never brewed without hops. Regular grocery store malt extract can probably work to some extent though you probably won’t get the enzyme power from it that you would normally get if you used malted barley and did the initial steeping process. No real need to use distilled water if you’re going to boil your water because the chlorine or fluoride will evaporate off pretty quickly in the boil. Also, try to use ingredients without preservatives in them because those preservatives are designed to keep bacteria and yeast from growing.
I knowingly made a Cider out of many bottles of unfermented cider that contained preservatives. I eventually got a fermentation but it took a long time. I was lucky in that it didn’t get contaminated with other things. It turned out to be pretty good.
I can’t really talk shit because I’ve never done it but using grocery store materials might be like trying to make prison wine. It’s not going to be as good possibly. I feel for all the people who don’t have access to a homebrew store. However, if you can mail order it, that would be good.
Brewing yeast seems to be a lot more specialized then baking yeast. A lot of the different yeast strains can put off different flavors and have different performance. Using yeast specialized to brew what kind of beer you want would be optimal. I think hops are pretty indispensable but back in the day, before hops, monks used to make Gruit without hops. This is because they didn’t yet know that hops had this preservative quality. Soo, maybe hops aren’t necessary. But then I would not say that it’s beer.… And neither would Germany.
That airlock exposes the water to the air in the room way too much. That could be the problem. Fermentation airlocks have shields, or other designs to reduce that as much as possible.
Bottling wasn't shown. That airlock is fine.
@@BeeRich33 It's really not. A good airlock has a shield above it so that nothing can fall into the water to contaminate it. This didn't have that, so the water *very* easily could have been contaminated with any microbes in the ambient air. Avoiding contact with airflow in the room is important.
When goes the next episode of your shopping bag online?
I haven't given up but I am going over hills and valleys on this one. I'll share news asap...
Alex nice 👍
Our local brewery does beer-brewing courses, where you get to take your own beer home. That sounds like fun as well 💁🏻♀️
I find this so funny as in New Zealand we can buy everything to make homebrew beer at the supermarket... including the brew keg
I really wish we could have seen photos of the fermentation or the finished beer even if it was a failure. Sometimes that can give really good information as to what went wrong!
So fun to try! But such a bummer!
to make an easy airlock grab a balloon, poke a hole with a thin needle and cover the mouth of the fermentation chamber with it (you may need to cut the mouth of the balloon). when the CO2 pressure rises the balloon expands and the hole opens, venting gas. as the gas pressure drops, the rubber contracts, closing the hole and preventing oxygen from coming in. tested with homemade wine, it works.
Next time add yeast to previously boiled and chilled water in a regular glass , boiling works as a sanitation pretty well . Apply some pure alcohol to your hands and parts that cannot be boiled and have contact with a beer after boiling
Postum (coffee substitute made from roasted grain) might be good for a stout or Porter. Wheatena has roasted grain. Whole wheat pasta might be interesting.
Man I feel safety while watching your videos!
It was a good start!
Make your airlock out of glass. Think old beer bottle with the end ground off (there's tutorials out there), old wine bottle cork (easy to source, takes a drillhole relatively easy), glass straw, shot glass. put straw in cork, put cork in beer bottle, drop shotglass over straw. insert whole contraption on top of fermenter. Duck tape or glue shut.
edit: Why? Glass is much easier to disinfect, and apart from the cork (could go with those newfangled rubber ones), it's non-porous.
They sell beer making kits at the supermarket here in Sydney :P
There's plenty of things that could be changed up here pretty easily, not sure if any of those would have a material impact on the end product, or reduce the chances of infection.
Instead of making an airlock, .you could ferment in a bucket with glad wrap covering it.
If the supermarket already sells malt extract, just use that as the malt source, maybe a bit of sugar as well, but the cereals are all highly processed, and without any other enzymes from other grains to break them down, they're probably not going to add much to the beer (would be something to experiment with, what kind of cereals add desired flavours and fermentable sugars).
I kind of wonder about the purity of that yeast. If it's intended to be used for baking, then it may not need to be free from other, non-S. cerevisiae strains. As others have suggested in the previous video, a better source of yeast would be a bottle conditioned beer, Coopers in Australia for example, take the yeast from the end of that bottle (bottles), and use that instead.
Hops are always going to be hard to replace. Going for that wit style of orange peel and coriander is quite a good thought. There may be some orange or lemon extract/essence available in the supermarket as well to really amp up the bitterness to "beer levels", without any off flavours from boiling ingredients like those for extended periods.
I'd be even more interested in you making a cider. Pear cider is one of my favorites...
As always, thanks for taking us along through your journey. Some thoughts...
An infection was mentioned... But no details, no images. You usually let us know what the symptoms are when things don't go as planned. He mentioned that he got some CO2 in the bottle, but there is no mention as to how was it bottled, or conditioned.
Was it a flavor that led to this conclusion? You used bread yeast, so is it really infected, or did you get some esters in there that weren't favorable to the wort blend?
I usually use StarSan solution in my bubbler to prevent the possibility of 'growing' something and infecting the beer from above. Keeping with the theme of only using store bought items, you could have achieved the same using gin or vodka in place of the StarSan.
Also, there's a cover on the bubbler I use to prevent 'things' from falling into the bubbler. Your is sort of open to the environment. Insects, or dust, or... could have fallen into that water which then made it's way into the fermenter. If you have healthy fermentation (which he said there was), CO2 is going to be pushing everything away from the fermentation chamber, throught the bubbler, and out. So... If something got in via the straw, it would have been near the end of the fermentation once things settled down. It's also possible that with the healthy fermentation that the yeast froth came through the bubbler. If it just sat there in the cup (of unsanitized water), it could become infected, and make it's way back into the fermenter.
I agree with the thoughts below... you added water after the boil. Granted it was bottled water, but you don't know if the infection was something you added, or if infective material was in the water already, or the bubbler (was it sanitized?). Was your fermentor sanitized? Was the upside down cup in the bubbler sanitized? Where was the beer stored during fermentation? Was it consistently the correct temp throughout the fermentation?
It is a possibility that if the bottles were not cleaned fully that the infection got in that way too.
Beer is fun. Frustrating though. In cooking you know pretty quick if you goofed up. Beer is a hard days work making it, and then a couple of weeks waiting to see if you had good results. More, if you are not kegging (which you are not going to do with store bought items, then you have a bottle conditioning period to wait also.
Anyway, goodluck!!! And thanks for your hard work on the channel.
Bread yeast comes from breweries. It's infection rate is low. Pedio/Lacto infection is obvious. Their pitch rate suggests bottling was where the infection came from. He didn't mention flavours at end of primary.
@@BeeRich33 No, I wasn't saying that the yeast was the source of infection. I was saying... We have different strains of yeast for different flavors in the beer, right? I was saying that this would be another off flavor than what they might be expecting as the flavors they were expecting were not there, or, other flavors are there that they weren't expecting.
I SAW that raised pinky finger when you were 'taking tea' in the British Manner.
My guess for the infection is the airlock, or possibly that they didn't use pre boiled water for the yeast slurry. I use star san in my airlock just to keep it clean, if they used tap water and there was any suck-back then it could introduce a bunch of bacteria.
Feels like I'm watching a real life version of Dr.Stone haha, both quite entertaining :)
I spent years brewing beer at home and never had a single batch spoiled by bacterial infection. There’s only one rule: *everything* that comes in contact with your beer after the boil needs to be sanitised. Absolutely everything. If you forgot to sanitise the airlock or that cup where you rehydrated the yeast, that might be it.
Some other things to keep in mind:
1. mashing oats and wheat without any malted barley might not be a good idea. You probably didn’t have enough alpha- and beta-amylase to convert those starches into sugars. Yeast can’t eat starches, but bacteria can - that would mean a wort full of bacteria food. You’d probably have more success skipping those grains and using just the malt extract.
2. It looked like you used a heavy amount of malt extract. That would mean a lot of sugars, which would ferment and become more alcohol. You used bread yeast, which dies when the alcohol concentration reaches ~3.5%. If you still have sugars left at this stage, you’re allowing contaminants to propagate without the yeast competing. You definitely want to calculate the exact amount of malt extract you need in order to keep the alcohol content below 3.5% (or get a better yeast)
I wish you would have done a time lapse on the fermentation. I have made lots of mead, without any extreme steps to sanitize, never a problem. I don't even heat the honey or water.
Your airlock doesn't need to be so complicated, you can run a tube(drinking straws maybe) from the fermenter into into a tub of water and it will do the same thing. Good luck! Clean clean clean!
Ah yes, the failure stage that leads to further discovery! Looking forward to the solutions you'll come up with in future videos!
Alex it simply means that at some point something was not properly sanitized is all. You made beer but it was just "skunky" due to some foreign element getting into the mix. Look at it like this your "carboy" did not explode or anything like that and the items you got from the grocery store worked.
He better have blue fridge theory notebook merch personalized with his little doodles throughout the book.
When you added the yeast starter, you didn't seem to boil the water nor sanitized the plastic cup. That might've introduced some bacteria
Breathing mask to catch flying spit in case there is any. All of the water used in the process has to be boiled fist. Dust/evaporation cap for the air lock. Wash your hands up to the elbows, use cheese cloths or similar to cover the liquids when they aren't being handled - I doubt the wild yeasts in London would be beneficial to your process.
People are asking about he airlock being sanitized, but what about the cup that you put yeast and water in?
with sous-vide everything is easier
Hmmmmm, beer brewing a la sous-vide, interesting.....
Guga foods
Try mead next, it's far less fiddly. Suggest using starsan instead of using bleach, again far less fiddly.
Fruit added to a mead pre-fermentation also adds nutrients the yeast need that the honey lacks.
Our fruit infused mead turned out drinkable but I lament using champagne yeast, it's strong to the point of being mildly offensive. Another note, one batch we skipped the fruit in favor of plain raisins and added crushed butterscotch candy, this was a mistake that left it bitter for some reason.