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….
Chris was suspicious of the beer because it had a slight haze and bottled less of it. I’m glad he did! Tommorrow I’m going to go through Iowa City and pull as much of it as I can find and replace it with the beer we did yesterday. That is the advantage of keeping our distribution local! You can see the date code on the bottle, they are keyed as June 11th. There will be a nick on June, and then a nick on the top of the label towards the left side (for the day). Don’t be confused with June 22nd (good beer) that has a nick on June, and a nick on the right side. The best test, is to turn the bottle upside down, and gently shake it. If there is a haze, then thats bad (unless it is white ale or pale ale). Please email the brewery about it!
What to change? Well lets see. We have been having slow fermentations this week, as I have tried to bring our lager strain back up from scratch myself. Sometimes this works great, and saves us 200$ from having an outside lab do it. This time it did not work so well, so we are ordering the yeast from White Labs (they house our custom lager strain). Secondly, I am going to be more vigilante about checking and replacing parts of the filter.. its something that I loathing doing because its so expensive, but problems like this cost more money, especially in lost customer confidence.
One step at a time. Really, these sort of problems will never go away with outdated equipment we posses here. We can only do the best we can, and hope that some time in the future we will be able to expand out of our cellar. However with good QC I feel as though I can catch these problems within a week of bottling it.
Ok some good news? The White ale is selling so much faster than my estimate, that i’m very afraid we may run low on kegs of it during the 4th of July holiday. Now thats the sort problem I like to have!