Jeff Irvine : How to Salvage a Crummy Batch

Bodensatz Brewing

How to Salvage a Crummy Beer, and a Look at One Reason Why This Could Be a Good Thing to Know How to Do.

Sooner or later you are going to brew a beer that you're not satisfied with. There'll be something funny about the taste that just doesn't sit well. It could be a visit from your mother-in-law "Ester", a house call from "Al D. Hyde" (Dr. Jekyll's familiar alter ego), or perhaps an unwelcome arrival of the "Fusel" family. It could even be that most dreaded of all-- the "scorched" taste. If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the scorched taste, I can describe it thus: Perhaps you recall the dehydrated little "smoked bacon bits" that were so popular to sprinkle over restaurant salads in the '70's?-- tasted kind of like a combination of "Liquid Smoke" and polystyrene. Well, imagine stirring about eight tablespoons of those into your glass of beer... THAT'S the scorched taste.

If you have ever been plagued by any of these tastes, I am going to suggest a panacea for just about any of these funky flavours, excepting patent infection or overhopping.

The technique is based on a Cornelius keg system, and is something I call an "in line hop filter".

The Cornelius "dip tube" is generally of two sorts-- a straight tube that leads to its own indentation in the bottom, or one that curves toward the natural depression in the middle. If you've got the curved one, you might be able to turn it a bit so it sits a centimetre or two off the bottom: otherwise you'll just have to cut a bit off. It could be handy to have one keg with a "short" tube even for other purposes (I won't go into why now), but don't be afraid to play around with your keg-- they're hardy little things, and you can always change it back (get a new dip tube) if you change your mind.

One standard way of dry hopping is to use a nylon stocking to contain the hops. This is the next principle to apply. When it comes to my OWN brewing, no equipment is "too good" for my beer. OK, call me a snob, but I would shun the use of a simple nylon stocking when trying to produce the world's best beer-- I use an old sock.

This choice of fine materials, is spurred on by the fact that the "Sock Fairy" makes frequent visits to me, and graciously removes one of each matching pair from my drawer. Each time I awaken to this miracle, I consider it to be an omen that their was a holy use intended for all these unmatched socks... Nothing is holier than my own beer.

Take one of your own unmatched socks (colour optional) and boil it in a little pot on the stove. I'm worried less about eventual fungal cultures derived from between your toes, than I am about detergent residues.

Pluck it out with a fork and let it cool down until handleable.

Stuff about 30 gms (one Wizard of Oz.) of nice whole aroma hops into the sock. Now I don't want you to think that this "30 gms." is some arbitrary number that I've just "plucked out of my hat". This number has been scienterriffically arrived at, by being the maximum amount I can stuff into one of my socks and still knot it. I take a size 10D (Euro 43, Chinese 28), so adjust alpha content according to shoe size (see conversion table below).

I usually lay a bit low on sanitation, and am way below the recommended minimum daily adult requirement of two pints of Iodophore, and think that often it's quite enough to squirt things off with water and let them dry inverted. When it comes to finished beer, I'm a bit more fickle about what I throw into it. I usually take the stuffed and knotted sock and sort of roll it around, using the fork, in another 2 cm of boiling water, as I've been handling it quite a bit during "stuffing", and one can never be too sure that the odd nose pick hasn't slipped in when not paying close attention.

Lift it up (or spear it) with your fork, open your keg, and toss it in. You can either dump it into a full keg, or an empty to which you rack (probably better). I'm just not sure this will work if the dip tube in your object keg isn't sitting a bit off the bottom. You might as well throw the "hop tea" in as well that resulted from the rolling wash.

Artificially carbonate, and leave at about 2 1/2 kg. (Yeah, I know that's not a "real" pressure unit, but many understand it better than KPascals), or about 40 p.s.i..

Let it sit a day. Open the tap full. If you don't feel a distinct "thump" and see a reduced flow rate, recharge the keg and wait another day. When the hops in your sock are saturated with liquid, they'll sink to the bottom. The initial quick flow rate will suck them into your dip tube, and amazingly, they stay there. This "in line hop filter" you have created, is essentially no different than a hop back, just applied at a different time in the process, and able to be hastily constructed when needed.

This method works remarkably well, I think, for two reasons: 1) You introduce a lot of hop aromatics that tend to overpower other flavours-- gives you a kind of "microbrewery flavour", where often the hopping is none too subtle. 2) The hops themselves are veritable chemical warehouses, and capable of binding a lot of nasty stuff, and keeping it there in storage (somewhat analogous to your hot break).

The finished product will be a tad cloudier, a little foamier (requiring more pressure to dispense), and a bit of hop residue might sneak through to the odd glass. I found this technique very valuable during the sharp uphill years of my own learning curve, and it imparts such a lovely hop flavour, that I sometimes still do this to "unspoiled" beers. I find it particularly nice in the Spring time.

So when the Robins, the Cuckoo, the Woodchuck, the crack of a bat on ball, the shout of a lad bowling a leg break through to the rubbish bin, or whatever your particular symbol of Spring arrives-- give it a try! You might find you like it.

Oh. You may be wondering why I'm so familiar with the taste of "scorching". Once when I was stirring grains into my strike water, I noticed a funny aroma. It persisted throughout the mash, after which I inspected the immersion heater, which was caked with about 1 cm of black crud.

I couldn't figure it out, until I remembered who had used my brewing house last. It turns out that Ol' Sven had decided to invent a RIMS (though he of course had no idea that it was called that, or that anyone had ever done it before. He was just following that great Bergslagen tradition of continually reinventing the wheel).

He started by disconnecting the windshield squirting pump from his car, hooked it to the tap under the false bottom, and powered it with my battery charger, in order to recirculate and avoid stirring. Well, it did the "re-" but not the "-circulate". That little whining wizard of a pump, pumped it dry, and the wort that ran through the false bottom, immediately baked itself onto the heater-- for a long, long time.

What's a fellah' to do? I finished brewing it up, but after tasting the finished product, I've never quite been able to even look at a "Rausch Bier" again. Actually even that horror was salvageable by using an in line hop filter (well, sort of).

It may interest you, that after chipping the black crud off of the immersion heater, soaking it in NaOH for weeks, and scraping and scraping, I got the thing clean again.

I have saved a clear plastic bag of some of the bigger "bac-o-bits" nailed to the brewhouse wall as a reminder. If anyone is planning on making a salad for Godzilla, I'd be happy to send you some. Otherwise, if you want to test the recovery powers of an in line hop filter, I could mail you some to intentionally spoil a brew with. About one nanogram should do.

Oh yeah. One more word of advice. If a guy named "Sven" calls and wants to borrow your brewing house, say "yes", 'cause he's a helluva nice guy, and pretty interesting too. You might want to make sure you are home when he's brewing, however, in case he decides to use your cat to scrub out his fermentation vats with.

References: 1. Cheap Restaurant Quarterly: 1972, vol.3. "Still Another Use for Industrial Waste in the Creation of a Gourmet Meal" Pork Rhinde et al.

2. Hopping Rate (in IBU) to Shoe Size Conversion Table: Ya gotta' be kiddin'! Did you really look for it?!

The above comments are solely those of the author's and a few equally unreasonable souls, and are not intended to offend anyone who likes playing with nylon stockings, nor were they intended to offend anyone named "Sven", and certainly not Sven Ottosson, who lives just south of the village of Guldsmedshyttan, on the west side of the road, in the red house, with the car with the incredibly filthy windshield parked next to it.

I would also like to extend a special thanks to Brina Burke and the "Voodoo Brewers" for there help and encouragement in embarrassing myself publicly.