I was thinking last night about sanitation and off-flavors. I think my sanitation process has gotten a bit lax as of late. A couple of the beers that I have had around for a little while seem to be developing some off flavors. Nothing severe but they just don’t taste all that clean.
I realized that I haven’t changed my tubing recently. I try to change out most of my tubing every 6 months or so. I admit the last couple brew sessions I have been late cleaning up things. Now that the colder weather has settled in here in NE, it becomes that much harder to want to go out and do a thorough cleaning of tubing and plastic parts. (I brew in the garage.)
My next trip to the homebrew shop will involve getting several feet of tubing. I need to replace the outlet hose from my kettle and the racking cane hose. I also have to get some fresh tubing for my blow-off tube. That got all gunked up while brewing the Belgian Tripel.
I usually clean the tubing with a short soak in hot PBW, but I can see some black spots in some parts of the tubing that just won’t soak away.
Time to get things cleaned up before I contaminate more sweet beer. How often do others change out tubing?
Chris
I try to take good care of all my plastics. Its been about a year and I just replaced all the plastics in my set up, but not because of age. I brewed a lambic and decided that having one set of plastics for lambics and one for everything else was a good idea.
Mike
I have heard that stratagy used by others too. Do you have a seperate fermentor for the lambic too? An interesting experiment would be to give that fermentor a normal cleaning and sanitizing, then brew a typically pale ale in it. Let it sit in primary for a few weeks longer than normal. See if you get any contamination from the lambic as carry over.
Any fruit in that lambic?
Chris
I use mainly glass carboys and don’t worry about the contamination from lambics since glass is nonpermiable. For this lambic (my first) I used glass for the primary fermentation and then transfered to a plastic bucket for the long conditioning time. I racked into the bucket on top of 9 pounds of homegrown cherries. In hindsight the cherries were a mistake. I froze them to break the cell walls, then pitted them and steeped them at 170 degrees F for 20 minutes. The mistake is that I used too much water for steeping and dumped it all into the bucket (didn’t want to loose all the cherry juice in the water). The lambic is now ready and its too watered down. Seems like a wet wine more so then a dry lambic ale.
I think I will try brewing a pale ale with my lambic plastics just to see it does carry a chance of cross contaminating. I’ll bottle it instead of kegging and can let it age out a bit to see if it gets brett or lacto infections.
Rick
Since I’ve only been brewing for less than two years, and haven’t been too serious about my hobby until recently, I haven’t replaced anything but the tubing for my autosyphon. I replaced that after I noticed some discoloration after letting it sit on my work bench for a month or two. I should have hung it up on the pegboard to let it drain, but for some reason I didn’t. I now keep the tubing hanging on the pegboard between brews. I also sanitize everything in the dishwasher prior to use, but that may be too harsh on the plastics, but time will tell. The autosyphon has a small crack in the top of the plastic tube, but it’s far enough up that it hasn’t affected anything yet, but I’ll probably have to buy a new one soon.
John P.
My tubing hasn’t so much become discolored as it has disappeared! I started with about 6 feet of tubing that I used for everything, but I have cut off sections for various projects both brewing related and other over the past couple years. Now I need more, but just because my now 3 foot long piece is woefully insufficient.