Tragedy At the Brewery

It's been a while since my last post and a lot has happened around the brewery. First, we brewed a California Common (aka Steam Beer) 2 weeks ago. It was a relatively straight-forward brewday and a very simple recipe. Only 9 lbs of 2-row and 0.9 lbs of crystal 60 along with a modest 2 oz's of northern brewer hops. This beer also used the California Lager yeast, and as of today, is out of the fridge (that was set at 55 degrees) and is resting in the garage (about 63-65 degrees) until we keg it on the 27th. Hopefully, it will be a nice, crisp, easy drinking beer for the spring time.

As for the tragedy: The people I bought our kegs from told me the kegs were "clean" and just needed to be sanitized prior to use. I sanitized and then filled with our schwarzbier and brown ale. The brown ale was sitting in our garage to condition/bulk age for about 1 week before I put it into the fridge and hooked up the gas. Being that I am not very patient and just want to taste a sample of everything, I took a sample of the brown ale on Friday night. Terrible. It tasted soapy; very soapy. I thought that was odd (seeing as I though the black ipa had a similar taste, though not as strong as the brown ale) so I took a sample from the black lager. Even worse. Undrinkable.

I went to the garage again and opened up the only empty keg to see if there was something inside that could be giving this off taste. When I smelled the inside, it smelled exactly like the off flavor we were tasting in the beers: a bit medicinally and very soapy. We came to the conclusion that whatever the kegs were "cleaned" with were not properly rinsed out and as a result, the flavor was now in our beers. We think that since the black IPA was so hoppy, that it masked the flavors to some extent which is why it wasnt as noticeable. However, in the brown, which is less hoppy, and the black lager which is barely hoppy, the flavors were much more pronounced and made the beers undrinkable. Since they were undrinkable, we had to dump them.

I think I died a little inside as I dumped 10 gallons of beer down the drain on Friday night. They were both really good before going into the kegs, especially the schwarzbier, and we had such high hopes for them. The black lager was the hardest to dump as we brewed it early enough to allow for it to actually lager for 6-8 weeks before drinking. The brown was to be the replacement for the black IPA as that keg is getting closer and closer to kicking.

As a result of the fallout, Elise let me make both the brown and the schwarz simultaneously on Sunday. Luckily, my neighbor now has his own mash tun and boil kettle and I was able to do side-by-side batches and get everything done in about 4.5 hours. There were a couple of mixups with hop additions, but nothing that would make much of a difference in the final beer. Now we have about 5 weeks before the brown ale will be ready to drink and hopefully we can drink the black lager in the middle of May.