-- watch the video before reading this comment -- Tips for next time from a brewer: Checking your sanitation should have been the first thing you investigated! ;) 1. be sure you thoroughly clean everything, even sanitize the bags you put your hops in and stuff if they are going into the fermenter. Anything touching the beer after it has cooled needs to be thoroughly sanitized (you even sanitize fruit if you brew with it!) 2. When you go to bottle, you should do a step called "racking" - you basically pour off the fermented beer into another, clean container (usually with a spigot), leaving all of the trub (the layer at the bottom of yeast + grain particles) behind 3. Very gently incorporate your priming sugar (sugar + water solution) into your **racked** beer. Be careful not to aerate the beer as that will cause oxidation to occur more rapidly. Very gently incorporate your priming sugar,, don't make any bubbles :) #2 is especially important, at 9:10 you can see you poured your priming sugar into the fermenter and then subsequently mixed up your yeast cake into the beer. What you want to do is pour off the beer into another container, *then* add your priming sugar. I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but since you mixed in your yeast cake your beer is going to taste extra yeasty and probably a little bit bitter. A lot of it will settle out in the bottle, so when you pour your fist bottle do it very slowly to leave all the trub at the bottom of the bottle! Very excited to see your tasting video
Tips for making narrative and creating suspense from a theatre person: don't go with the obvious answer first or you shorten your story and cheat your audience out of what they came for.
@@go2yadramah415 Humans could sanitise their stuff with all kinds of different processes. Simply using ethanol to disinfect your products works, and it'll last you a long time if you collect it after sanitising. Even a salt brine will work to sanitise. Loads of other chemicals like Phenol were used in recent history. But you can also do the work with just boiling water. If you take yeast from fruit peels etc, they are typically able to fight off bacterial infection by outgrowing them or producing all kinds of antibiotics. And sometimes you'd simply end up with sour beer. Not a problem if the customers aren't choosy.
That's why the episodes are scripted, notice they never show the infection, I have nothing wrong with scripting the episodes because it's good entertainment but I just wanted to speak out for a suspicion of mine, anyway I love this channel and this series even if it is scripted keep on the good work alex
i've seen quite a few people use what you used and had very good results, I suppose that it just comes down to getting the small percentage of contamination out of the equation, but without your solution there is no definite way of ensuring it.
Beer isn't as fragile as some people are making it out to be.The amount of starch in your wort probably set you up for failure, and the sanitation issue sealed your fate. With a properly prepped wort, a minor sanitation issues isn't likely to be fatal. Anyways, star sani is a good choice, and I hope it works out for you (though I'm not particularly hopeful for the flavour you're going to get from the shredded wheat)...
I hope you didnt put them straight in the fridge after bottling, its too cold for secondary fermentation. They need at least a week (sometimes 2) at room temp for proper carbonation
Lets hope he doesn't have bottles exploding due to the priming sugar being added. Of course as you indicated the cold should stop most of the carbonation from happening.
I was going to say the same thing... Bottle conditioning needs to be at room temp, fridge temp will just put the yeast to sleep,a nd beer will not carbonate.
You did a great troubleshoot brainstorming to find the problem, There is steps in the precess to prioritize tho, 2 steps are really critical : - Sanitazing everything after the hot side - Cooling. (the more effective the cooling, the less time your beer will be sitting in an environment where lactobacillus can thrive, and bacteria grown faster than yeast!) There are homebrewer that are succesfully brewing beer with the "no cooling method". They usually sanitize a jug topped to the bung to let no headspace and then rack it to the fermentation vessel once at temp. Another thing, do not shake the fermenter for bottling ! You now have a lot of yeast in your bottles, the clarity and the taste of the beer would be affected ! 2 options, transfer to a bottling bucket or add sugar to the bottles. And don't throw your bottles in the fridge right away, let them carb up 1 or 2 weeks at ambiant temp! To keep a reliable equipment you can also buy a 5L glass jug, an airlock and a silicon bung for less than 10 euros in every homebrew store. Loosing beer is painfull ! I hope the infections are behind you ! ;) Léo
All this inspired me to homebrew some blackberries into wine ready for christmas and was actually discussing sanitary methods yesterday and I realised I did not have any sanitiser but my girlfriends daughter suggested I use miltons and she had some! Crazy coincidence!
There is an entire family of beer but uses Lactobacillus to enhance its flavor. You guys should’ve kept some of the infected beer and track fermenting it further in bottle to see if it would’ve been any good! Berliner Weisse At one time the most popular alcoholic beverage in Berlin, this is a somewhat weaker (usually around 3% abv) beer made sour by use of Lactobacillus bacteria. This type of beer is usually served with flavored syrups to balance the tart flavor.
I like the way you wrote « wrong » on the blue fridge Avec la loupe c’était super bien pensé et c’est le genre de détail qui donne toute sa qualité à un épisode 👌
Keeping the bottles in the fridge will slow the yeast down to almost a standstill. Bottle conditioning should be done at a cool room temperature. Just make sure to keep the bottles in some type of containment chamber. If your ratio was off for the priming sugar, the bottles will literally explode.
Another thing that can effect the taste is the solids at the bottom. After forming, you can do a process called racking. Basically siphoning off majority of the clear brew. I like a little as the of the yeast in the racking vessel for the carbonation in the bottles.
AWESOME JOBS GUYS!!!!! This was fantastic and I really enjoyed the WHOLE process that ya'll went through to work on the problem of infected beer!!! 😍😎😍😎
Biologists here, I'm sure the biggest risk factor to a controlled fermentation is the human. So clean anything you touch and wear protection, for the beer - not for you :D Lactobazillus are nice guys I'm sorry for you that they ruined your beer!
alex you have to taste your beer at every step. the cooled wort, after fermentation, after lagering, and indeed when it has finished refermenting. If there is anything off, a seasoned brewer will taste this from step one. The only way to learn is to try.
When you put the sugar water for the carbonation, i would recommend siphoning the beer over to another big bottle to leave away the dead yeast. Would result in a much clearer beer
Actually there are beers where Lacto baciluss can be favourable, like the Berliner Weiße which uses Bretonomyces yeast instead of the usual Carlsberg yeast and can have lacto fermentation too.
Pull them back out of the fridge to allow for secondary fermentation to happen, your bread yeast won't like the cold so you won't get any carbonation. You'll also be prolonging the time the beer is exposed to oxygen (due to a lack of yeast activity following bottling) which leads on to my next suggestion. Try to avoid agitation when bottling next time - by agitating (due to pouring from the neck) you're increasing the risk of oxygenation and the final beer tasting cardboard-y. Try a simple siphon instead, to allow you to fill from the bottom up 🙂🙂 Also, consider transferring from fermenter to a bottling vessel, prior to the bottles themselves. This avoids mixing all of the yeast cake in with the final product. Gently stir your priming sugar through in the bottling vessel to minimise oxygen pickup 👍👍 Good luck, have fun! 😁
Wait two-three weeks before opening a bottle to taste one. I had one beer that I had to wait over a month to taste it. Waiting is the hardest part, but the reward will be worth it.
this is actually awesome... I was always interesting in brewing at home but hated the idea buying a bunch of gear for 1 time use. (doubt I will brew often) Now I can basically rummage through the office pantry and grab some straws and plastic cups to make an airlock and brew in a water bottle for 1$
Alex, greetings from finland! Some tips: Do not mix the yeast from the bottom with the fermented liquid, you should use pipe to extract only the liquid and discard 10-15 % of the whole content
I've only had 2 infected batches in 10 years and each was sanitation. You don't even need an airlock, per se. A towel with sanitizer works equally well.
Every beer I've ever brewed I've used an acidified bleach solution for sanitizer, basically vinegar and bleach. 1oz bleach 1oz vinegar to 5 gallons water. The owner of starsan was on a podcast stating this method is valid as a no rinse sanitizer. It works by lowering the pH to inhospitable levels for microorganisms as i understand it. Sanitize the bottles in the dishwasher with the steam from the dry cycle.
My parents always used a white metabisulphite powder and some kind of bright pink powder that might be a chlorinated sanitizing chemical of some kind. Both are specialized products that I don't think you could find in a general supermarket.
Having been a home brewer of beer and mead (yum!) and having spent a lot of time in home darkrooms, I thought right away that there was a 70% chance things were not as clean as you thought - good luck.
You could also have used an oxigen bleaching agent. Like Vanish Oxi or the stain removing stuff you can buy at Lidl. It is the same stuff as a lot of brewers sanitize their material with. In Thr Netherlands it is sold as Chempro Oxi.
Cleaning and sanitation is the key part of the process for making beer. The other store brand cleaner you can use is Oxiclean Free. You can also use powdered dishwashing soap that is natural scent-free. If you can get all these in Europe at the store than your whole experiment to make beer from the grocery store will be complete. I use both of these when I don't have BPW brewery cleaner for home brewing. With these two cleaners, it's important to rinse well before sanitizing the equipment. Sanitization is most important after the wort is chilled down to prevent infecting your beer.
You could use Sodium percarbonate which can be found in many supermaket. It is basically active oxygen. It is sold as Chemipro from brewers material provider.
Salut Alex What we use to disinfect when we brew is caustic soda, cheap, easy, and available at the supermarket. Also, why not also do a gingerbeer, pineapplebeer, mead episode. All with supermarked bought ingredients. Regards Tiaan South Africa
Cold crash before bottling i.e. put the fermentor in the fridge. You'll get fewer bubbles while bottling. And leave the bottles at room temperature for 2 weeks to allow secondary fermentation or the beer will be flat.
It's generally good practice to rack the beer off of the yeast cake before you prime it. It might turn out quite yeasty since you mixed the yeast cake into the beer.
In the bottling process, after batch priming with sugar and filling the bottles they are normally left out at room temperature so the yeast can carbonate the beer. If you put them in the refrigerator the process will take A LOT LONGER. The yeast slow down and can go dormant.
1. You should avoid aerating the beer during the bottling process. You want as little O2 in the bottle as possible to avoid infection. 2. I hope you let the bottles sit at room temp for a week or two before adding them to the fridge, and what we saw was just the power of editing. Otherwise you are going to have dormant yeast which means no CO2. Flat beer = sad beer. Best of luck Alex!!!
Hey, I really appreciate what you're doing, man. It would be awesome to meet you in person one day. I have a passion for cooking and anything related to it. Next year, I'm planning to venture into making my own gin. It would mean a lot to me if you could possibly demonstrate the process. Keep up the great work !
Question: How do you know that the beer is infected? what are the flags that you watch out for? Also, when you used Milton to "sanitize" what was involved in sanitzation?
There are a variety of different off flavours that are associated with an infected beer, you can google for beer infection flavours to get a list. Follow the packet instruction, sanitation requires a minimum contact time, which varies. Don't rinse it off either. Anything touching the wort, other than hop additions, added from about 10 min to go onwards should be sanitised, spray the crap out of everything. Hands, scissors, the outside of the yeast packet etc..
Sourness where there shouldn't be any, an unhealthy krousen, floating stuff, at the top or an excess of dead yeast at the bottom, weird smells. Mold. The list goes on and on heh. Most of them non lethal or agents that could cause sickness.
Not sure if it’s true, but I have heard (and practiced) that one should try not to mix oxygen into the beer when bottling it. I have usually always poured the beer over to a secondary bucket to get rid of the yeast cake, mixed in boiled sugar water slowly and bottled after. This leads the beer to be clear and clean :)
Salut Alex, c'est Can. I also brew my own beer at home and use PBW and Star san for the sanitation. I am happy that you are at some point but I am still suspicious about some things: 1- You add sugar dissolved in water into the final product before bottling and you shake the mixture. In my opinion, you must not mix the residue with the final product. You need to transfer the beer with a tool (like an aquarium bottom cleaning tool) into the bottles and then add the beer. And put only one sugar cube for each bottle before closing the tap. 2- If you want your beer with gas, you must give yeast to eat that sugar cube in the bottle to produce CO2 in time. That will produce the gas in the bottle. If you put the bottle into the fridge before giving some time to them, they will fall asleep or die and your beer will not have any gas and will not taste good. You need to know the type of your yeast. If it ferments at the top, the temperature must be max. 25C. If it's a bottom type like lager beers, you need around 13C. Another thing is, after producing CO2 in the bottle, yeasts like to clean the rest of the residues so as long as they stay in bottle, your beer will be much cleaner and tasty. This process called cleanup is very important for most kinds of beers. It takes around 10 to 15 days. Then you may put your bottles into the fridge and also wait for a min. 2-3 days. Shortly, I think your beer will not have any CO2 in it unless you waited some days before putting them into the fridge. I really appreciate your effort in trying to make a home-crafted beer with only supermarket ingredients. Keep goin'!! Salut mon ami!
You should have racked the beer from the container using a sanitized plastic tube into the bottle to eliminate a lot of that sludge. It won't cause the beer to be infected BUT it will improve the flavor.
Alex the infection is from the water that you add that was not boiled. The water addition to dilute before you added to the fermenter. It was not pasteurized
There is another way.. This is not for the feint hearted or the empirically casual as if you get the mix wrong you'll make some rather unpleasant chlorine gas. Bleach's effectiveness can be improved by using a little vinegar after dilution. I mix up about 10l of water with 10ml of vinegar and 10ml of bleach for a no-rinse contact sanitizer. Dilute your bleach first, then add vinegar, if you mix it in your fermenter you can wash everything else inside it.
You can add vinegar to bleach to make it more effective. Mix in water as when mixed together directly it creates chlorine gas. Used to Homebrew and never purchased sanitizer, never had an infection.
Funny thing about sanitizing, I've just recently made some country wine and I used fairy liquid to sanitize my brewing equipment and I didn't get an infection in my wine.
1. You should not mixed your sugar water in the fermenting tank with the inactivated yeast cake. You should either decant the fermented beer into a new sterilized empty tank, or if you don't wanna clean that up, divide the sugar water directly into each bottle! 2. After you bottled your beer, you should let them sit at room temperature for about 2 weeks to help them carbonate - after that you can chill them in the fridge before consuming!
Sodium percarbonate easaly findable in a packless grocery. It'is a way better sanitization agent and cheaper than star san. Used since two years (25 batch) without infection ;)
I actually recommend you try your "green" beer. It's interesting and informative to notice the qualities that change upon maturing in a bottle. Certain beers on store shelves, I swear, can be improved by mellowing in a cellar for a year.
- First, I think you'll want to be careful with your airlock. Make sure the liquid in it has sanitizer in it. It's always possible you're going to get an over fermentation that will go through the airlock and if your water isn't sanitized, you risk whatever bacteria is growing in it to come back down. Good tip is, use cheap vodka as the liquid in your airlock. - Second, when you cool off wort using frozen bottles, make sure the outside of the bottles were sanitized otherwise you risk an infection there too. - Third, you shouldn't put your bottles in the fridge for the first week as the bottle fermentation will be extremely slow in the fridge. Leave them out for a week then fridge to cool them before drinking. Otherwise in the fridge, your beer might still be flat after a week.
Alex is like an alternate universe version of Daniel Ricciardo lol one where Daniel moved to France and didn't grow up racing and instead loved cooking
A rule to live by with brewing is if you don't know if you sanitized something, sanitize it again. Keep your hands clean at all times, if you touch a foreign surface WASH THEM!
I actually would love seeing you team up with NileRed/CodysLab in a future episode(s) about brewing beer/cooking. Both could be quite helpful, either from a chemical as well as a practical point of view. So, since there are actually possibilities to extract/synthezise your reactants from household items through quite simple methods, it would be nice seeing you stepping up your game (; Improving yourself in the art of cooking is basically nothing other than the process of understanding the chemistry behind it. EDIT btw You may also check out NileReds series on "EdibleChem", which is why I first thought about including chemistry in my personal cooking experience. It may be far from a real cooking lesson though at least it shows how close related both subjects are.
For the next beer experiment: make regular beer.. BUT make every ingredient your self, malt you own weed, harvest wild hops, make proper cooling equipment, harvest yeast from a shop beer (don't harvest wild yeast that's to acidic) and let it grow with labo equipment.
Ha! First thing I thought of causing infection/off flavor was the bleach. Next time try iodine for sanitation. Cheap and in the pharmacy section. Lot of home brewers use it.
90% of the time when brewing, if you get an infection, the problem is sanitation. I will admit that I was cringing when you dumped the simple syrup into the primary fermentor and then swirled all the Lees back into the beer. Rack the beer off the lees before adding the simple syrup/priming sugars. This batch is going to be very yeasty and not very beer-like. Might also consider forced carbonation instead, but I'm thinking you probably can't find the stuff to do that in the supermarket (unless you've got a really cool supermarket).
If there are any preservatives in your ingredients then it would possibly allow the yeast to not grow or grow very slowly, giving opportunity for other bacteria to get a foothold. All of your ingredients should be devoid of preservatives. Anti-yeast preservatives are pretty common in food because obviously yeast is a common contaminant, which is why people started making beer and wine. I made hard cider one time from cider that had preservatives in it. I was really lucky and didn’t get contamination but the east took a very long time to grow.
Surely the next Alex project is to make the best German Beer Pretzel to accompany the beer. You've got the dough machine and rollers for it, and really, who eats croissants with beer ??? do the PRETZEL !!!!
@@hetspook666 I've never heard that before(I know vodka can melt and warp plastic), I have done a significant amount of brewing and always used cheap vodka. I've never seen any melting, or warping of any kind in the airlocks I use. I'm not saying you're wrong, I've just never experienced it personally. The plastic used in the airlocks(that I use at least) may be made with a grade of plastic meant to withstand the leaching effects of alcohol.
-- watch the video before reading this comment --
Tips for next time from a brewer:
Checking your sanitation should have been the first thing you investigated! ;)
1. be sure you thoroughly clean everything, even sanitize the bags you put your hops in and stuff if they are going into the fermenter. Anything touching the beer after it has cooled needs to be thoroughly sanitized (you even sanitize fruit if you brew with it!)
2. When you go to bottle, you should do a step called "racking" - you basically pour off the fermented beer into another, clean container (usually with a spigot), leaving all of the trub (the layer at the bottom of yeast + grain particles) behind
3. Very gently incorporate your priming sugar (sugar + water solution) into your **racked** beer. Be careful not to aerate the beer as that will cause oxidation to occur more rapidly. Very gently incorporate your priming sugar,, don't make any bubbles :)
#2 is especially important, at 9:10 you can see you poured your priming sugar into the fermenter and then subsequently mixed up your yeast cake into the beer. What you want to do is pour off the beer into another container, *then* add your priming sugar.
I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but since you mixed in your yeast cake your beer is going to taste extra yeasty and probably a little bit bitter. A lot of it will settle out in the bottle, so when you pour your fist bottle do it very slowly to leave all the trub at the bottom of the bottle!
Very excited to see your tasting video
How informative! I’m not Alex, but thanks!
I use unscented bleach and I've never had an infection. Over 30 brews.
I was going to type up most of this but then you wrote this all up. Thanks!
@@Endermensinspace By that point fermentaton is mostly done. You add just a bit of sugar to start it again to make CO2 for fizzyness.
Tips for making narrative and creating suspense from a theatre person: don't go with the obvious answer first or you shorten your story and cheat your audience out of what they came for.
Water. Grain. Yeast. Hops. Long ago, the four ingredients fermented together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Lactobacillus attacked.
a happy infection though.
Yep - everything in our home brewery will get a full sanitisation every time we brew. We also make any 'sour beers' in completely different equipment.
But Glen how do you do it without sanitizing like the colonial period did that the real science if you ask me.
Sea Salt is a good disinfectant...
@@go2yadramah415 sea salt maybe???
A wild Glen appears...
@@go2yadramah415 Humans could sanitise their stuff with all kinds of different processes.
Simply using ethanol to disinfect your products works, and it'll last you a long time if you collect it after sanitising.
Even a salt brine will work to sanitise.
Loads of other chemicals like Phenol were used in recent history.
But you can also do the work with just boiling water.
If you take yeast from fruit peels etc, they are typically able to fight off bacterial infection by outgrowing them or producing all kinds of antibiotics.
And sometimes you'd simply end up with sour beer. Not a problem if the customers aren't choosy.
It’s more fun when you fail along the way. It makes the end result all that much more satisfying
Thats how learning works
Not really, getting it right the first time is the totally amazing satisfaction.
Eric C Yeah it’s satisfying when you have the funds to start all over again as many times as you want lol.
That's why the episodes are scripted, notice they never show the infection, I have nothing wrong with scripting the episodes because it's good entertainment but I just wanted to speak out for a suspicion of mine, anyway I love this channel and this series even if it is scripted keep on the good work alex
I actually remember reading about that Milton brand sanitizer and it sounded like a good idea to me too.
Supermarket cashier: Aw that’s sweet he’s a dad.
Alex: Goes home, brews beer.
Well it is Alex' baby project.
He is in fact a dad with young children...
@@nathanrogers8713 really?
@@jyrki2275 yeah about 1.3m
@@NonsensicalSpudz hahahaha
i've seen quite a few people use what you used and had very good results, I suppose that it just comes down to getting the small percentage of contamination out of the equation, but without your solution there is no definite way of ensuring it.
Beer isn't as fragile as some people are making it out to be.The amount of starch in your wort probably set you up for failure, and the sanitation issue sealed your fate. With a properly prepped wort, a minor sanitation issues isn't likely to be fatal. Anyways, star sani is a good choice, and I hope it works out for you (though I'm not particularly hopeful for the flavour you're going to get from the shredded wheat)...
I hope you didnt put them straight in the fridge after bottling, its too cold for secondary fermentation. They need at least a week (sometimes 2) at room temp for proper carbonation
Fernando Caracciolo lol I was gonna say
Lets hope he doesn't have bottles exploding due to the priming sugar being added. Of course as you indicated the cold should stop most of the carbonation from happening.
You never heard of Lager beer
radry100 ? As in a "lagging" beer type joke?
I was going to say the same thing... Bottle conditioning needs to be at room temp, fridge temp will just put the yeast to sleep,a nd beer will not carbonate.
I haven't watched alex for almost 2 years and its so nice comming back to watch his videos and see him succeed
You did a great troubleshoot brainstorming to find the problem,
There is steps in the precess to prioritize tho, 2 steps are really critical :
- Sanitazing everything after the hot side
- Cooling. (the more effective the cooling, the less time your beer will be sitting in an environment where lactobacillus can thrive, and bacteria grown faster than yeast!)
There are homebrewer that are succesfully brewing beer with the "no cooling method". They usually sanitize a jug topped to the bung to let no headspace and then rack it to the fermentation vessel once at temp.
Another thing, do not shake the fermenter for bottling ! You now have a lot of yeast in your bottles, the clarity and the taste of the beer would be affected !
2 options, transfer to a bottling bucket or add sugar to the bottles. And don't throw your bottles in the fridge right away, let them carb up 1 or 2 weeks at ambiant temp!
To keep a reliable equipment you can also buy a 5L glass jug, an airlock and a silicon bung for less than 10 euros in every homebrew store.
Loosing beer is painfull ! I hope the infections are behind you ! ;)
Léo
Never mind the infection, love your use of a Kawco pen.
That quick “brewing montage“ to test the new sanitizer was very cool!
Really enjoying this series!
All this inspired me to homebrew some blackberries into wine ready for christmas and was actually discussing sanitary methods yesterday and I realised I did not have any sanitiser but my girlfriends daughter suggested I use miltons and she had some! Crazy coincidence!
I love the perseverance and determination of Alex. I love you bud!
There is an entire family of beer but uses Lactobacillus to enhance its flavor. You guys should’ve kept some of the infected beer and track fermenting it further in bottle to see if it would’ve been any good!
Berliner Weisse
At one time the most popular alcoholic beverage in Berlin, this is a somewhat weaker (usually around 3% abv) beer made sour by use of Lactobacillus bacteria. This type of beer is usually served with flavored syrups to balance the tart flavor.
Bad beer doesn't turn into Berlinerweisse.
I like the way you wrote « wrong » on the blue fridge
Avec la loupe c’était super bien pensé et c’est le genre de détail qui donne toute sa qualité à un épisode 👌
Keeping the bottles in the fridge will slow the yeast down to almost a standstill. Bottle conditioning should be done at a cool room temperature. Just make sure to keep the bottles in some type of containment chamber. If your ratio was off for the priming sugar, the bottles will literally explode.
Agreed, I was going to comment on that but you did it first.
and I've had exploding bottles lol
this is probably my favorite series on this channel so far, and thats saying something. i wish i could buy that butter magnet :c
Your description of us as a Bunch of F****** amateurs couldnt be more on point.
Also, it has given me some merch ideas.
Another thing that can effect the taste is the solids at the bottom. After forming, you can do a process called racking. Basically siphoning off majority of the clear brew. I like a little as the of the yeast in the racking vessel for the carbonation in the bottles.
Yeah I know how you feel! Last time I went to London I came back with chlamydia....
You deserve the clap for that comment, pun intended! 😁
what😂
This comment needs to spread more quickly.
Man I love your lab/kitchen
"a bunch of f**kin amateurs"
well that's just like your opinion man. hahaha! no they definitely goofed this up and i knew from the beginning it wasn't going to end well lol
nothing is fucked here, dude, nothing is fucked
@@kewlbns69 he was quoting alex lol
Alex, please don't say that you don't like science - you just did science in front of our very eyes. More science than most people do in a lifetime.
Crazy Alex is at it again. I love it! :D
I love you Alex, the cineastik effort is
incomparable. Greets from a Cologne
AWESOME JOBS GUYS!!!!! This was fantastic and I really enjoyed the WHOLE process that ya'll went through to work on the problem of infected beer!!! 😍😎😍😎
Biologists here, I'm sure the biggest risk factor to a controlled fermentation is the human. So clean anything you touch and wear protection, for the beer - not for you :D Lactobazillus are nice guys I'm sorry for you that they ruined your beer!
Awesome series and collaboration!! Looks like I've found another great UA-cam channel to follow.
This is awesome. Keep the project alive!!!!
alex you have to taste your beer at every step. the cooled wort, after fermentation, after lagering, and indeed when it has finished refermenting. If there is anything off, a seasoned brewer will taste this from step one. The only way to learn is to try.
When you put the sugar water for the carbonation, i would recommend siphoning the beer over to another big bottle to leave away the dead yeast. Would result in a much clearer beer
Alex, you can also use 30 ml vinegar+ 30 ml odorless domestos (sodium hypochloride) per 20 liter water. You can sanitate the equipments with these
I love your deep dives.
I like the commitment to make all of those batches to solve the problem.
Moral of the story: more beer is always the solution
You should try making mead with supermarket supplies only. Takes longer to ferment but you can taste it sooner, and very hard to get wrong!
I can't wait for the next episode! Hurry up!
4:58 when you blew through the airlock you just contaminated the water and the tubes inside it and therefore potentially contaminating the beer.
He more than likely sanitised the airlock before brewing as he learned that the issue was with sanitation 🤣
Actually there are beers where Lacto baciluss can be favourable, like the Berliner Weiße which uses Bretonomyces yeast instead of the usual Carlsberg yeast and can have lacto fermentation too.
Pull them back out of the fridge to allow for secondary fermentation to happen, your bread yeast won't like the cold so you won't get any carbonation. You'll also be prolonging the time the beer is exposed to oxygen (due to a lack of yeast activity following bottling) which leads on to my next suggestion.
Try to avoid agitation when bottling next time - by agitating (due to pouring from the neck) you're increasing the risk of oxygenation and the final beer tasting cardboard-y. Try a simple siphon instead, to allow you to fill from the bottom up 🙂🙂
Also, consider transferring from fermenter to a bottling vessel, prior to the bottles themselves. This avoids mixing all of the yeast cake in with the final product. Gently stir your priming sugar through in the bottling vessel to minimise oxygen pickup 👍👍
Good luck, have fun! 😁
I admire the commitment to this crazy project, cheers mate!
Wait two-three weeks before opening a bottle to taste one. I had one beer that I had to wait over a month to taste it. Waiting is the hardest part, but the reward will be worth it.
this is actually awesome... I was always interesting in brewing at home but hated the idea buying a bunch of gear for 1 time use. (doubt I will brew often)
Now I can basically rummage through the office pantry and grab some straws and plastic cups to make an airlock and brew in a water bottle for 1$
Loved all the dramatic music, really added something!
Wow, there was music?? Ha I'll now watch again and pay attention! Obviously did the trick creating mood without realising!
Alex, greetings from finland! Some tips:
Do not mix the yeast from the bottom with the fermented liquid, you should use pipe to extract only the liquid and discard 10-15 % of the whole content
I've only had 2 infected batches in 10 years and each was sanitation. You don't even need an airlock, per se. A towel with sanitizer works equally well.
Every beer I've ever brewed I've used an acidified bleach solution for sanitizer, basically vinegar and bleach. 1oz bleach 1oz vinegar to 5 gallons water. The owner of starsan was on a podcast stating this method is valid as a no rinse sanitizer. It works by lowering the pH to inhospitable levels for microorganisms as i understand it.
Sanitize the bottles in the dishwasher with the steam from the dry cycle.
Yay Alex! I'm glad you figured it out, and thanks for sharing it with us. Yay beer!
Using Milton is such a cool idea!
My parents always used a white metabisulphite powder and some kind of bright pink powder that might be a chlorinated sanitizing chemical of some kind. Both are specialized products that I don't think you could find in a general supermarket.
sanitize, sanitize, always sanitize. happy drinking!
Having been a home brewer of beer and mead (yum!) and having spent a lot of time in home darkrooms, I thought right away that there was a 70% chance things were not as clean as you thought - good luck.
You could also have used an oxigen bleaching agent. Like Vanish Oxi or the stain removing stuff you can buy at Lidl. It is the same stuff as a lot of brewers sanitize their material with. In Thr Netherlands it is sold as Chempro Oxi.
Great series. I really like your motivation!
I think this is your best edited video yet. 5* quality sir.
its always sanitation. use a cleaner then a sani to finish for any fermentation project
Cleaning and sanitation is the key part of the process for making beer. The other store brand cleaner you can use is Oxiclean Free. You can also use powdered dishwashing soap that is natural scent-free. If you can get all these in Europe at the store than your whole experiment to make beer from the grocery store will be complete. I use both of these when I don't have BPW brewery cleaner for home brewing. With these two cleaners, it's important to rinse well before sanitizing the equipment. Sanitization is most important after the wort is chilled down to prevent infecting your beer.
You could use Sodium percarbonate which can be found in many supermaket. It is basically active oxygen.
It is sold as Chemipro from brewers material provider.
Salut Alex
What we use to disinfect when we brew is caustic soda, cheap, easy, and available at the supermarket.
Also, why not also do a gingerbeer, pineapplebeer, mead episode.
All with supermarked bought ingredients.
Regards
Tiaan
South Africa
Cold crash before bottling i.e. put the fermentor in the fridge. You'll get fewer bubbles while bottling. And leave the bottles at room temperature for 2 weeks to allow secondary fermentation or the beer will be flat.
It's generally good practice to rack the beer off of the yeast cake before you prime it. It might turn out quite yeasty since you mixed the yeast cake into the beer.
In the bottling process, after batch priming with sugar and filling the bottles they are normally left out at room temperature so the yeast can carbonate the beer. If you put them in the refrigerator the process will take A LOT LONGER. The yeast slow down and can go dormant.
Use glad wrap with an elastic band instead of an airlock.
Use baby bottle sterilisers.
1. You should avoid aerating the beer during the bottling process. You want as little O2 in the bottle as possible to avoid infection.
2. I hope you let the bottles sit at room temp for a week or two before adding them to the fridge, and what we saw was just the power of editing. Otherwise you are going to have dormant yeast which means no CO2. Flat beer = sad beer.
Best of luck Alex!!!
Hey, I really appreciate what you're doing, man. It would be awesome to meet you in person one day. I have a passion for cooking and anything related to it. Next year, I'm planning to venture into making my own gin. It would mean a lot to me if you could possibly demonstrate the process. Keep up the great work !
Question: How do you know that the beer is infected? what are the flags that you watch out for? Also, when you used Milton to "sanitize" what was involved in sanitzation?
There are a variety of different off flavours that are associated with an infected beer, you can google for beer infection flavours to get a list.
Follow the packet instruction, sanitation requires a minimum contact time, which varies. Don't rinse it off either. Anything touching the wort, other than hop additions, added from about 10 min to go onwards should be sanitised, spray the crap out of everything. Hands, scissors, the outside of the yeast packet etc..
Sourness where there shouldn't be any, an unhealthy krousen, floating stuff, at the top or an excess of dead yeast at the bottom, weird smells. Mold. The list goes on and on heh. Most of them non lethal or agents that could cause sickness.
Always use starsan! Great video!
Not sure if it’s true, but I have heard (and practiced) that one should try not to mix oxygen into the beer when bottling it. I have usually always poured the beer over to a secondary bucket to get rid of the yeast cake, mixed in boiled sugar water slowly and bottled after. This leads the beer to be clear and clean :)
For sanitiser, you could have gone across the road to the pharmacy for some peroxide. Also, I'm surprised you didn't use barley in your wort.
It's amazing you went from baby face to dad with some facial hair. Magic French hacks.
Salut Alex, c'est Can. I also brew my own beer at home and use PBW and Star san for the sanitation.
I am happy that you are at some point but I am still suspicious about some things:
1- You add sugar dissolved in water into the final product before bottling and you shake the mixture. In my opinion, you must not mix the residue with the final product. You need to transfer the beer with a tool (like an aquarium bottom cleaning tool) into the bottles and then add the beer. And put only one sugar cube for each bottle before closing the tap.
2- If you want your beer with gas, you must give yeast to eat that sugar cube in the bottle to produce CO2 in time. That will produce the gas in the bottle. If you put the bottle into the fridge before giving some time to them, they will fall asleep or die and your beer will not have any gas and will not taste good.
You need to know the type of your yeast. If it ferments at the top, the temperature must be max. 25C. If it's a bottom type like lager beers, you need around 13C.
Another thing is, after producing CO2 in the bottle, yeasts like to clean the rest of the residues so as long as they stay in bottle, your beer will be much cleaner and tasty. This process called cleanup is very important for most kinds of beers. It takes around 10 to 15 days. Then you may put your bottles into the fridge and also wait for a min. 2-3 days.
Shortly, I think your beer will not have any CO2 in it unless you waited some days before putting them into the fridge.
I really appreciate your effort in trying to make a home-crafted beer with only supermarket ingredients. Keep goin'!!
Salut mon ami!
You should have racked the beer from the container using a sanitized plastic tube into the bottle to eliminate a lot of that sludge. It won't cause the beer to be infected BUT it will improve the flavor.
Alex the infection is from the water that you add that was not boiled. The water addition to dilute before you added to the fermenter. It was not pasteurized
Nicely done HACCP.
There is another way.. This is not for the feint hearted or the empirically casual as if you get the mix wrong you'll make some rather unpleasant chlorine gas.
Bleach's effectiveness can be improved by using a little vinegar after dilution. I mix up about 10l of water with 10ml of vinegar and 10ml of bleach for a no-rinse contact sanitizer. Dilute your bleach first, then add vinegar, if you mix it in your fermenter you can wash everything else inside it.
I would like to see a serie of brewing wine
You can add vinegar to bleach to make it more effective. Mix in water as when mixed together directly it creates chlorine gas. Used to Homebrew and never purchased sanitizer, never had an infection.
Funny thing about sanitizing, I've just recently made some country wine and I used fairy liquid to sanitize my brewing equipment and I didn't get an infection in my wine.
1. You should not mixed your sugar water in the fermenting tank with the inactivated yeast cake. You should either decant the fermented beer into a new sterilized empty tank, or if you don't wanna clean that up, divide the sugar water directly into each bottle!
2. After you bottled your beer, you should let them sit at room temperature for about 2 weeks to help them carbonate - after that you can chill them in the fridge before consuming!
Sodium percarbonate easaly findable in a packless grocery. It'is a way better sanitization agent and cheaper than star san. Used since two years (25 batch) without infection ;)
So. Much. Suspense!
Idea for a second fridge magnet.
I will ketchup with you next time.
michiel pater Genius
Or...Ketchup on my episodes
Pouring the beer into the bottles can lead to "off flavors". Gotta syphon it in to avaiod aerating the brew after its main fermentation..
I actually recommend you try your "green" beer. It's interesting and informative to notice the qualities that change upon maturing in a bottle. Certain beers on store shelves, I swear, can be improved by mellowing in a cellar for a year.
You should have syphoned it in the bottle to prevent a lot of yeast of getting in the bottle. (finished my homebrew a week ago)
- First, I think you'll want to be careful with your airlock. Make sure the liquid in it has sanitizer in it. It's always possible you're going to get an over fermentation that will go through the airlock and if your water isn't sanitized, you risk whatever bacteria is growing in it to come back down. Good tip is, use cheap vodka as the liquid in your airlock.
- Second, when you cool off wort using frozen bottles, make sure the outside of the bottles were sanitized otherwise you risk an infection there too.
- Third, you shouldn't put your bottles in the fridge for the first week as the bottle fermentation will be extremely slow in the fridge. Leave them out for a week then fridge to cool them before drinking. Otherwise in the fridge, your beer might still be flat after a week.
Alex is like an alternate universe version of Daniel Ricciardo lol one where Daniel moved to France and didn't grow up racing and instead loved cooking
Star san sanitizer is the best because it is no rinse. I've used it dozens of times with zero issues.
Sanitation is THE most important thing with brewing anything, sanitize everything.
Milton is also no rinse, and available in Camden Road Sainsbury's so not cheating. ;)
A rule to live by with brewing is if you don't know if you sanitized something, sanitize it again. Keep your hands clean at all times, if you touch a foreign surface WASH THEM!
Did you sanitize the ice-bottles? I mean that would be a good way to transfer bacteria etc.
They made so many mistakes. Rookies
Mckayver imagine not being a rookie in the field of fermenting using corner-store supplies
They were dumped into a pot of boiling wort. That sanitised them.
@Lassi Kinnunen sounds like you had a lot of fun when you were young. Lol
I did
Gotta love those reusable Grolsch bottles!
Cant wait any day longer
I actually would love seeing you team up with NileRed/CodysLab in a future episode(s) about brewing beer/cooking. Both could be quite helpful, either from a chemical as well as a practical point of view.
So, since there are actually possibilities to extract/synthezise your reactants from household items through quite simple methods, it would be nice seeing you stepping up your game (;
Improving yourself in the art of cooking is basically nothing other than the process of understanding the chemistry behind it.
EDIT
btw
You may also check out NileReds series on "EdibleChem", which is why I first thought about including chemistry in my personal cooking experience. It may be far from a real cooking lesson though at least it shows how close related both subjects are.
no
For the next beer experiment: make regular beer.. BUT make every ingredient your self, malt you own weed, harvest wild hops, make proper cooling equipment, harvest yeast from a shop beer (don't harvest wild yeast that's to acidic) and let it grow with labo equipment.
Ha! First thing I thought of causing infection/off flavor was the bleach. Next time try iodine for sanitation. Cheap and in the pharmacy section. Lot of home brewers use it.
90% of the time when brewing, if you get an infection, the problem is sanitation.
I will admit that I was cringing when you dumped the simple syrup into the primary fermentor and then swirled all the Lees back into the beer. Rack the beer off the lees before adding the simple syrup/priming sugars. This batch is going to be very yeasty and not very beer-like. Might also consider forced carbonation instead, but I'm thinking you probably can't find the stuff to do that in the supermarket (unless you've got a really cool supermarket).
If there are any preservatives in your ingredients then it would possibly allow the yeast to not grow or grow very slowly, giving opportunity for other bacteria to get a foothold. All of your ingredients should be devoid of preservatives. Anti-yeast preservatives are pretty common in food because obviously yeast is a common contaminant, which is why people started making beer and wine.
I made hard cider one time from cider that had preservatives in it. I was really lucky and didn’t get contamination but the east took a very long time to grow.
Surely the next Alex project is to make the best German Beer Pretzel to accompany the beer. You've got the dough machine and rollers for it, and really, who eats croissants with beer ??? do the PRETZEL !!!!
And the journey continues!
You can also fill the airlock with sanitizing solution for more protection
It is 100% recommended to use some of the solution, you can also use vodka.
Don't use it pure, vodka can melt the plastic..
@@hetspook666 I've never heard that before(I know vodka can melt and warp plastic), I have done a significant amount of brewing and always used cheap vodka. I've never seen any melting, or warping of any kind in the airlocks I use. I'm not saying you're wrong, I've just never experienced it personally. The plastic used in the airlocks(that I use at least) may be made with a grade of plastic meant to withstand the leaching effects of alcohol.
@@TheRealBeardedFetus yes it does and it will, but this dude is using a thin plastic cup and a straw for an airlock.
@@hetspook666 I mean it would definitely melt his airlock.