Just a week after I wrote the 'I think I've contaminated my beer' post, this classic mistake happened. I'd just bottled a handy Black Rock NZ ale and went to clean the fermenter. I found this spoon inside:
My wife and I had been looking for that spoon for weeks - it's handy for poached eggs!
I'd hunted high and low, even behind the dishwasher, with no luck, never once thinking I'd used it to stir the beer wort. I'm fairly confident the brew was fine, and a taste test proved it tasted like beer, especially as I'd been a diligent brewmaster and sterilised everything before brewing.
The point is this: brewing is full of little disasters, and no one will thank you for serving them a horrible tasting home brew at your next 'BBQ and Brews'.
So here are five mistakes that home brewers should bear in mind before they even crack open the can of malt extract from their kit. Follow them and you'll be well on your way to some delicious brews. And because things still go sideways from time to time even for old hands, I've added a proper when-things-go-wrong section further down, complete with the strangest thing I've ever pulled out of a bottle.
1. Wash, wash away your sins
We actually mean sanitise. Sanitise the heck out of everything you use. If you're starting out, your equipment and kit should include a cleansing and sterilising agent, and at the very least your drum needs to be fully clean and sterilised before you start. If brewing is going to become a hobby, sanitisation needs to be a habit. There is nothing more disappointing than going to bottle your brew and catching the scent of a batch that's been contaminated by nasty bugs.
2. Temperature
It would be a mistake to think home brewing is a 'set and forget' process. Wherever you leave your beer to ferment, it needs to be a spot that holds the right temperature and holds it constant. Don't leave your beer out on the back porch to do its thing. Too much heat kills the yeast, so no direct sunlight; too much cold and it goes dormant. Wrap it in blankets in the garden shed if you have to, but keep it somewhere steadily warm. Heating mats are popular for keeping beer at a constant temp. My work colleague swears by leaving hers in the bathtub.
3. Those bubbles...
Just because the bubbles have stopped moving through the airlock, it doesn't mean fermentation is complete. It would be a real shame for your bottled beer to start exploding because you didn't give it the chance to finish. Use a hydrometer to confirm fermentation is done before you even consider getting that beer into glass bottles.
Hint: more experienced brewers tend to let the batch sit in the fermenter at least a week longer than the kit can recommends. Once the yeast has stopped feasting on the sugars and making alcohol, fermentation is technically finished, but there's a tidy-up phase where sediment drops to the bottom of the fermenter and helps clear the beer while the yeast keeps ticking things over.
4. Running before you can walk
Get the basics down first. Before you run off chasing the fanciest beer you can imagine with imported English yeast and three kinds of hops, learn the principles of beer making. You'll enjoy your first few brews far more if you keep them simple, then branch out into more complicated recipes once you've got the fundamentals sorted.
5. Not keeping records
If you write down what you did, what you used, when you did it and why, you'll have a solid basis for judging your brewing failures and successes. Pull off a stunner of a beer and you might actually be able to work out how it happened. It can come down to remembering which hops you used.
6. Drinking your beer too early
Patience, my young Padawan. Post-bottling, your beer needs time to carbonate and to simply settle and do its thing. Fermentation is a simple chemical reaction in one sense, but there's a complex relationship between the ingredients that needs time to sort itself out. The patient brewer who waits at least three weeks before indulging will make better beer for it. Make it to five or six weeks and it should taste better still. That said, if you're after a hoppy beer, you can be forgiven for getting into it a little earlier.
When things go wrong: quick fixes
Even when you do everything right, brewing throws the odd curveball. The good news is that most problems have a known cause and a known fix. Here are the ones that trip people up most often, and what to actually do about each. For the full list, keep the troubleshooting page bookmarked, and the homebrewer's first-aid kit walks through nine of them step by step.
| What happened | Likely cause | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Fermentation never started | Yeast pitched into wort that was too hot, or the room is too cold | Warm the fermenter to the yeast's range, give it 24 hours, then pitch a fresh sachet if there's still nothing. |
| Stuck fermentation (gravity stops high) | Temperature crash or tired yeast | Rouse the yeast, nudge the temperature up a couple of degrees, and confirm with a hydrometer before you assume it's done. |
| Rotten-egg or sulphur smell | Normal lager yeast stress, or under-pitching | Usually clears with time and conditioning; here's the full rundown. |
| Gushing or exploding bottles | Bottled too early, or too much priming sugar | Only bottle at stable final gravity, and measure priming sugar rather than eyeballing it. |
| Cloudy beer that won't clear | Rushed off the yeast, or chill haze | Give it more conditioning time and cold-crash; cloudy beer explained here. |
| Sour, funky, off taste | Contamination from poor sanitising | Usually not rescuable, so prevention is everything; what contamination looks like. |
The two-minute save that prevents most of these
Before you fill a single bottle, do a visual inspection. Rinse, sanitise, then actually look inside each bottle in good light. It sounds obvious, but it's the step everyone skips, and it's the step that saved me from something a lot worse than a hazy beer....
The strangest thing I've pulled from a bottle
I was rinsing a beer bottle at the sink and noticed something wouldn't come out when I upended it. A clump of sediment? Some sticky hops? No. It was a weta. For the sake of the marketing department, let's call him an 'ale cricket'.
If you don't know what a weta is, it's a large insect native to New Zealand, strong enough to draw blood with its pincers and big enough to catch and eat a mouse. I'm in Wellington, where weta are a fact of life, and this little fellow had clearly decided an empty bottle was a fine place for a snooze. Come bottling day, he ended up permanently in the drink.
I can report the weta-infused lager didn't actually taste too bad. But once I realised what I was drinking, I poured the rest down the sink. Still, better than a dead mouse at the bottom, I suppose.
The real lesson
When bottling your beers, don't just rinse and sanitise before filling with your liquid gold, actually look inside every bottle first. A tequila brand can get away with a worm on purpose. You probably don't want a weta by accident.
