'Dad, are you ever going to get around to doing something with that beer you made?'
'Sure son, one day. Although I need to work out if what I have here is infected or not...'
Fast forward to today, still not knowing the status of the dark ale that possible went bad, I still bottled it. What could possibly go wrong here?
The best of home brewing days
It's the tale as old as time really - finally getting off my bum to use the can of Dark Ale extract I misplaced for months, I whipped up a batch of the dark stuff and got lost in a beer related train of thought while I was filming it for YouTube.
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| Back when the temperatures of the garage was far higher than 'Freezing' |
However after a few days of letting things sit in the fermenter and bubble away, I opened up the operation for a closer look and noticed the spiderwebs across the surface that no home brewer ever wants to see - a sure sign it's actually infected. Either something got in that shouldn't have or there was something in the kit already ready to unless the beer spiders but either way, it's not what you want to see ever unless you're somehow aiming for a sour style beer, which I clearly wasn't here.
Rather than discard it, I wondered if I could save it and filled a couple of carboys through the tap outlet, making sure none of the spiderweb top reached the opening. Then I popped the lids on and conveniently forgot about things for months until my son asked about it while working on his bike one day.
I did tell him something about 'the longer you leave dark ales to ferment the better' but now come to think of it, I think that was for making Porters. I mean they run along the same lines but either way, in my mind the longer I left it, the better. Until the day I gathered some supplies and got to bottling that is.
Another random find
Bless the generous person who once bought this bottle of home brew bottles, never ended up using them and then rather than throwing them out, donated them to the local op shop where I grabbed them for the price of a slightly folded $5 note. Given that they even came with the original unused caps too, this was the perfect find for me as it meant I didn't have to wash any of mine in the collection saving heaps of bottling time!
(I did however give them all a rinse with some hot water and let them dry before funneling in some of the foamy stuff. Even though they'd never been used the box had been open and the less dust in my already dust covered brew the better!)
For the sugar priming side of things I've opted for the cheap and readily available carbonation drops (available at your local supermarket). With bottles this side, it's two drops per bottle, pop the cap on and leave them to settle for a couple more weeks before they hit the fridge for a week. In my case popping them back in the box of bottles works perfectly.
Just as long as I don't forget they're there..
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| The foaming is always such a pleasing sight. There be beer in there! |
Operation beer salvage
With a minimum of spillage (ah the concrete was thirsty obviously!) I ended up with 11 bottles of the hopefully okay dark ale stuff. And just in case one of the carboys was okay and the other was not, the beer from the first one ended up with white caps, carboy two's contents got a black top.
(Again, thanks to whoever donated the bottle of bottles with the white caps - originally I was just going to whack a bit of tape on each to say which bottle it came from.
'But why didn't you just give them a sniff to see if you could pick up anything funky?' I hear you ask. A valid and solid question yes, but sadly my sense of smell still isn't up to snuff. While I can breathe through my nose again after nasal surgery a couple of years ago, my sense of smell turned up for a limited time only again before exiting yet to return.
So I'll be a case of wait and see. And given how long it's taken to get around to this (I started it in March, it's now almost the end of July) then a little longer wait won't kill me.
Full report on how things go coming up soon!
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