From: mark@verdix.com (Mark Lundquist)
Newsgroups: rec.crafts.brewing
Subject: Re: first batch questions
Date: 11 Jan 93 16:30:31 GMT
Article-I.D.: verdix.9512
Organization: Verdix Western Operations, Aloha  OR

In article <C0o2F5.C84@news.cso.uiuc.edu> amead@s.psych.uiuc.edu (Alan Mead) writes:
>I've read (ok, more like scanned) this group for a couple weeks, if there
>is a FAQ, could someone point me to it?

FTP to sierra.stanford.edu:/pub/homebrew.


>I'd like never to lose a batch to infections.  How sanitary should I
>be?

Well I would think that washing your hands should be sufficient for
your own personal sanitation.  Bwahahaha!  Sorry...anyway, the rule of
thumb is that (1) anything that goes into the boil or touches the wort
during the boil is sanitized by the boil, so don't bother using a
sanitizing agent on it! and (2) anything that comes in contact with
the beer after it has cooled below about 160'F must be sanitized.
Examples of things that don't need to be sanitized:  your big stirring
spoon; immersion wort chiller; your boiling pot itself.  But
everything that touches the cool wort has to be sanitized, e.g. let's
say you have a pitcher that you use to pour cold water into your
fermenter when you top up to 5 gallons -- sanitize that pitcher!  Or a
funnel that you use when pitching yeast into a carboy....

Use common sense and don't go beyond what's practical.  It seems that
many novice brewers tend toward overkill, imagining that the virus from
the movie "Andromeda Strain" will get into their beer and mutate and
take over their house, making it impossible to ever brew beer there
again, unless they wear a cleanroom suit and swab their kitchen with
nitric acid.

I don't mean to minimize the importance of sanitation.  All I mean is
that with a little experience you will gain a feel for what
constitutes appropriate measures to take.  For instance, a guy I work
with used to brew, but he wasn't happy with his beer and decided that
his problem was insufficient sanitation.  It turns out that his
sanitation was fine, but he was doing some other things wrong and
I guess he never got any good advice about what to change.  In the
meantime he kept getting more and more "anal-retentive" about
sanitation, until he was boiling everything and stressing out all
over the place, and pretty soon he just bagged the whole thing because
it wasn't fun anymore.

>For instance, I cleaned out a new pot and bucket and then poured 5
>gallons of bottled water into them.  The water in the pot I boiled, but
>I used the bucket water without further sterilizing.  I figured the
>risk was minimal, was I kidding myself?  [As an aside, I never realized
>what a hassle NOT using tap water was going to be...  I think I'll use
>it next time regardless].

Boiling bottled water is overkill.  As for boiling your tap water, you
may not have to do it unless your city water system puts a ton of
chlorine in the water.  I use tap water and I never boil it.  It all
depends on where you live.  Now, you should have sanitized your bucket
if the water you put in it was going to go into the wort after the
boil.

>Also, I have a tight fitting top for the pot.  I set it outside to cool
>for a while.  Was this a bad move?  I can't imagine that it would have
>been safer inside (where I keep food products).

Top for the pot?  I can't tell what you did or whether it was good or
bad.  Supply more context.

>
>Also, I boiled some water (3 gallons, I *think*) with the extract and
>after pouring it into my carboy, there was a half inch of tan
>particulate on the bottom of the car boy.  Is that malt protein?

Yes.

>Is it normal?

Yes.

>And I've been reading and all books disagree about *something*.

That's why there're so many books.

>Like is 2 oz of chlorine bleach in cold water an effective sanitizer?

In one gallon of water?  Sure.  Allow about 10 min. contact time with
this concentration to be "for sure, for sure".

>Should I then rinse it in anything other than cold water?

I don't know what else you'd rinse it with.  Somebody suggested using
Budweiser, that way there would be at least one good use for Bud in
the universe.

>Should I
>rinse it at all?

Some people are paranoid that the rinse water will compromise the
sanitation.  Others are paranoid that unrinsed bleach will react with
tannins from the grain husks to form chlorophenols which make your
beer taste like wet band-aids.  Pick your paranoia.  Me, I always
rinse whatever I bleach.

>What about the rims of bottles and carboys?  these
>typically become or stay wet after rinsing and, I would think, start to
>pick up airborne bacteria and such.  Should I flame the glass rim
>before capping/removing the plug?

Don't sweat it.  You'll just drop your Bic lighter in the carboy
someday, and then you'll really be singin' the blues. :-)

>Also, I've heard that the period after boiling the wort and before
>pitching the yeast is the most vulnerable time for beer.  How long does
>it normally take to cool the wort (ie, without a wort cooler)?  It took
>about 7 hours at room temp (ie, I brought the wort in from the cold
>after an hour and dumped it into the glass carboy which already had 2
>gallons of water and then topped it off; it was 7 hours between taking
>the wort off the stove and pitching the yeast).

If you want to speed things up, you can try setting your carboy in a
bathtub of water.  Put some towells around it to wick the water up
around the sides and top.  Maybe even put some ice in the tub too.
You could give your wort a cold shower!  Those measures will help
coold your beer, and they will also help you not to feel so bad about
forking up the $$ for a wort chiller! ;-)

>Furthermore, the wort was still about 84 degrees when I pitched the
>yeast.  I have one set of instructions (from the hobby shop I purchased
>mu extract from) that says to pitch at a temp below 85 and another
>(from papazian's book) that says below 78.  The yeast seem to be
>fermenting nicely (about 4-5 bubbles per second at 64 degrees from a
>1/4 inch blow off tube) this morning, 9 hours later.

Sounds good.  Warm pitching will make a difference in the flavor of
your beer, but by the time you can tell the difference you probably will
have gotten yourself a wort chiller anyway!  (Or borrow one, like I did
from the ex-brewer I was telling you about :-)

>Oh yeah.  And if I use malt extract to prime, is that kraeusening?

Pretty much.  That's what I do.  I doubt if anyone could notice a
difference between malt-primed beer and true kraeusened beer.

>Or must I use wort?  And for that matter, I wouldn't want to drink
>something that's been sitting in the back of my fridge for more than,
>say, 11 days.  Doesn't the wort you save to kraeusen start to go bad?

In a sterile, sealed container, in a refrigerator?  Naah.

Best wishes for many satisfying brews!  And as for sanitation, brew another
batch and then re-evaluate your procedures.  Too many novices get
caught up with stuff like wondering whether the beer might be better
if all their equipment were kept under a blanket of argon-krypton gas
during the brewing session, while meanwhile they are forgetting to bleach
their turkey baster.

Cheers,
--mark