Quality Control
Just when everything seemed to be going well, today turned that all upside down. We recieved two customer complaints from Iowa City this week about our Schild Brau. I did some investigating, and found that the Schild Brau that we bottled on June 11th was the culprit.
If you have been following along here, that was the batch that I had so much trouble filtering, because my dosing pump was worn out. Well this batch is turning bad fast! It somehow escaped my QC radar. I did HLP tests the week before I filtered, and I did not see any bacteria growing in those tests. After bottling, I keep a few bottles up next to the hot water tanks to do ‘accelerated shelf life tests’. Once a week or so, I turn the bottles upside down, and see if they are cloudy. If they are cloudy thats a bad sign, unless of course the beer is unfiltered. For the beers that are unfiltered, I need to taste them. I have become surprisingly good at tasting hot beer, since it is time consuming to cool them down first. Cooling them only numbs your taste buds anyway. But it is more difficult with unfiltered beers for sure, since every time I taste one I have to toss the sample, and I can’t check all the samples at once. Often times, only one or two bottles out of four will go bad. In that case it is often difficult to detect. We have had so few problems lately, that I admit I have been lax in checking these samples.
This morning I was kicking myself! I can only assume that my difficult filtration introduced a bug, but there is no way to be sure. We do not have CSI crime scene team on hand to investigate and find the culprit. The frustrating thing about making beer in a brewery like this is that you probably never know for sure what the problem is. All you can do is change a few things, and hope that one of those things was the problem.
As for the Schild Brau, we only bottled two pallets of it (120 cases) and half of that is still here at the brewery….
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