3 out of 12 ain’t bad

My homebrew problems do not lie in water. I tasted the first bottles of the Belgian Singel and the Unlikely Berlinner Weisse today — the former was okay (but without the traces of refreshment that were present in the last batch), the latter was an understandable failure. So out of 12 batches of beer made in Oakland, I think I can say that 3 were good (there’s still time for the smoked imperial stout to go bad though), 2 were bad. The rest have gone down the sink (mostly due to my near legendary ability to make gushers). So I’ve poured away more beer than I’ve brewed here.

This is somewhat disheartening and makes me question if it’s worth continuing with the whole thing — maybe my sanity would be restored by just giving away all my brewing stuff and just getting on with drinking the incredible beer I can buy at the local supermarket.

But then making good beer is not hard (making great beer is incredibly difficult though) so it’s just annoying that the cards don’t seem to fall in my favour. So I’m trying to rationally figure out what the hell’s going wrong with the beer making process.

1. Water. I’ve made three beers with bottled water — some of the beers I made with tap water have been bad, some I’ve made with Campden tabletted water have been fine. I don’t think water is the issue — I will use bottled water in the future though, just to make life a bit easier.
2. Pitching Temperature. This could be a problem — the tap water here is not as cold as it used to be in the UK. This, coupled with my less than efficient immersion chiller, means that I’m generally pitching on the warm side (~25C at a guess) — this could be a problem but most of the bad beers I’ve made have been muddy rather than hot, solventy or fruity which leads me this is not so much of a problem.
3. Fermentation Temperature. On the warm side, but I don’t think excessively so. This could be an issue (coupled with the former too), but I don’t have the space for a fridge or cooling equipment. So I need to work around this — the Saisons I’ve made have been bad too so it makes me think this isn’t the pressing issue
4. Mashing. This is my concern right now. I brewed in a bag back in the UK, and am trying to repeat this here. I used to do a two stage filtering as the bag went into the kettle (using a coarse then a fine mesh for filtering). It could be that I’m chucking a bunch of crap into the kettle and so it’s ending up carrying through into the beer and making it all go wrong. This would make sense since the good beers I’ve made have been from extract and all the gushers have been all grain beers.

So the solution presents itself: a) make some extract beers to convince myself that it’s not all a waste of time and if that’s the case b) move to a proper grain mash system over time. In the meantime I can have some fun doing partial mashes or steeping grain. And also exploring the range of DME available to the US homebrewer.

Fingers Crossed.