All Grain Recipe: #28 Jamil's Chocolate Hazelnut Porter

Another damn infection!

Okay, I wanted to create some beers for Thanksgiving. Something holiday-ish but not necessarily 'holiday' or "christmas" beers. I decided to go with a chocolate hazelnut porter and a witbier - both are spiced, but not 'holiday' spiced. The porter would be the more interesting one, while the witbier would be for family with less adventurous palates.

I retired my Mr. Beer kegs for this batch, and have moved entirely to Better Bottles. I picked up an extra one at HopTech in Dublin while mashing.

The recipe calls for baking cocoa added at the end of the boil. This turned out to be difficult, and it didn't distribute evenly until it boiled for a while (even then it was chunky). It sunk to the bottom of the fermenter. During fermentation, the cocoa all went up to the top with the krausen. It was all very strange and made me uncomfortable. If I were to make another chocolate beer, I'd stick with cocoa nibs or chocolate extract!

True to my word, I didn't repitch yeast. I used a fresh vial of WLP001, but with no starter. After a month in primary, the FG was insanely high - 1.028. Even given the amount of specialty malt, the attenuation was way too low, about 57%. Out of fear that I'd get bottle bombs, I bottled these all in 1 liter PETs, which would bend instead of exploding if fermentation started up again in the bottle.

After 3 weeks in the bottle, carbonation was perfect, but the flavor was... off. Ashy, like a freshly burned candle or incense. Unpleasant, and the hazelnut and chocolate just made it worse.

One more week, and suddenly all of my bottles were bulging. Opening the bottles led to a fountain of beer.

Okay, so I did have underattenuation, which led to fermentation in the bottle. No big deal, right? Just let off pressure until the CO2 level hits the right amount, then drink. The problem is that the flavor got worse instead of better, and no amount of pressure relief led to a proper amount of CO2. I believe there was an infection that didn't manifest itself until after the beer was bottled.

After I realized it was likely an infection, I poured everything out. Yet another failure; I'm starting to get discouraged.

Anyway, as usual the recipes are after the break.

All Grain Recipe: #26 Rogue Dead Guy Clone

This was an infected disaster. It was infected some time in secondary by my house wild yeast. It started fermenting again out of nowhere, and by the time I threw it out it had an astringent, Belgian-y flavor.

Let us never speak of it again.

For those curious, the recipe came from Can You Brew It, and is just after the break. I included notes I took while listening to the podcast, which is here.

Infection False Alarm

I opened a two-week-old bottle of batch #11, my Hefeweizen, only to have it overflow all over the counter!

Yes, my first gusher. A 'gusher' is, as you probably guessed, the term used when your beer is overcarbonated and spills out when uncapped. To be a true gusher, you can't have shaken, dropped or frozen the beer beforehand, and it doesn't really count if it only lasts a couple of seconds. A real gusher will pour out what seems like an endless amount as time slows down and you think about all the beer you're losing.

What the hell went wrong? Carbonation was calculated perfectly. The beer was refrigerated. My sanitation was as good (read: paranoid) as ever.

I recalled that my refractometer measurement had put this beer's FG at 1.006 - pretty damn low, but I figured it was just a super active yeast. Furthermore, the yeast used in this batch was a repitch from a previous batch.

My thoughts went immediately to a gusher infection - wherein wild yeast invades your beer and starts to ferment the stuff that your normal yeast won't ferment. When this happens, your beer continues to ferment down to the point where it is nothing but alcohol and water, continuously producing CO2 until your bottles eventually explode from the pressure.

I started to freak, and assumed that I had gotten wild yeast in my WLP300 when I washed and bottled it. To test my hypothesis, I opened up a bottle of batch #12, the Pliny the Elder clone I brewed with a repitched WLP001: GUSHER.

At this point I'm running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I open one more bottle of pliny and two more bottles of hefeweizen, all gushers. I of course drank them, which left me in a less than clear state of mind. Did you expect me to commit alcohol abuse? I think not.

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The next day, with a clear head, I start doing some experiments to find the problem. If the infection came from yeast repitching, there shouldn't be an infection in batch #15 or #13, but there would be in #14. If the infection was in the fermentor, it would be in #11 (the hefe), #12 (pliny), #14 and #15 (brewed in the same fermentors as #11 and #12). If it was in the bottling bucket, then #13 would be infection free (and thus have a normal FG) until bottled.

It was then that I discovered that my refractometer readings were off. By a lot. Normally, you can get a gravity reading of fermented wort with a refractometer if you plug it into BeerSmith along with the OG. The problem is that when double checked against a hydrometer reading, the refractometer reading was coming up 1 plato short. Consistently.

Thus it was that I thought my hefeweizen had 88% attenuation and my pliny had 93% attenuation. When I added 1 plato to their FGs and plugged in the numbers, the hefe went down to 75% and the pliny went down to 85% - both normal. Batch #13 also matched the hydrometer's reading perfectly if 1 brix was added.

Note: the refractometer reads OGs perfectly, so I'm not throwing it out. In fact, I may keep using it for FGs if it is consistently off by 1, because I can just add 1 - duh.

So, if the 'infection' didn't cause my beers to overattenuate, why did it cause gushers? Well, apparently it didn't. A pliny I put in the fridge the night before poured perfectly (and tasty, if a little grassy). A hefeweizen I poured several days later after refrigerating for a night also came out very nice (and also the palest beer I've ever managed to make!).

It turns out that because CO2 dissolves better in cold liquids, it is possible to get a gusher simply because you didn't refrigerate your beer long enough. This doesn't explain why my first bottle gushed, but it may have been inadequate mixing in the bottling bucket. I guess I'll never know.

I learned several lessons here - double check your FG with a hydrometer, even if you have a refractometer, refrigerate your beer adequately, make sure your priming sugar is 100% mixed in on bottling day, don't open your beer any earlier than two weeks bottled and RELAX. I learned these lessons the hard way so you don't have to!