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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
  Re: Infection and wort chillers (Fred L Johnson)
  Chilling Infection ("Alexandre Enkerli")
  re: infection and wort chillers ("David Lewinnek")
  9th Annual UKG Drunk Monk Challenge (jkleczewski)


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Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 07:33:45 -0500
From: Fred L Johnson <FLJohnson52 at nc.rr.com>
Subject: Re: Infection and wort chillers

Matt has done a great job identifying a source of infection in his 
brewery, the counterflow wort chiller. Matt described sterilizing the 
chiller in the oven as his usual practice, and I am pretty confident 
that this should do the job, but only if it is clean. Matt has not told 
us how he usually cleans the chiller after its use. I suspect his 
problem lies in an inadequte cleanup of the chiller after its use.

I have used a counter flow wort chiller for a couple of years now and 
have not had any infections, but I've never been very confident of my 
cleaning and sterilizing methods--you'll see why if you read on. 
Nevertheless, I thought I would offer what I've done and I welcome 
others comments and recommendations on this topic.

The first problem I encountered with using a counterflow wort chiller 
was preventing hops from getting into it. It is imperative that one do 
everything he can to prevent hop petals from getting into the chiller 
because they will find a lodging place and be very difficult to get 
out. When this happened on one brew session, I was getting black, 
rotten hops out for one or two brews after that. (Because the 
subsequent brews weren't infected by this crud is pretty amazing, but 
it may mean that I did a pretty good job of sanitizing/sterilizing it 
in spite of the dirt.) To prevent hops from getting in, I have a couple 
of barriers between the wort and the tube opening through which the 
kettle outflow goes. The outflow tube passes a perforated stainless 
steel plate at the bottom of the kettle and I put a stainless steel 
scouring pad on the end of the tube at the very bottom of the kettle. 
It isn't pretty and the more sophisticated Hop Stopper and real kettle 
plates would probably actually work better, but I've just not broken 
down to purchase these. What I'm using works...usually.

I let the hops and trub settle for a few minutes after flame out to 
form a bed above the outlet tube before starting to remove any wort 
from the kettle. When I'm ready to drain off the wort by pumping, I 
start the pump out slowly (like we do with our mash tun runoff) to help 
form a bed of hops and trub on the steel plate at the bottom of the 
kettle and around the scouring pad at the opening of the outflow tube. 
I watch carefully through the plastic tubing on the pump to make sure 
I'm not seeing hops coming through. Important: I recirculate the wort 
without putting the wort chiller in line until I'm convinced that no 
hops are coming through. Then I connect the wort chiller and begin 
recirculating through the wort chiller with the hot wort and without 
cooling to sanitize it for only a few minutes (I'm pretty impatient at 
this time of day). It only gets to about 190 degrees F, but this 
empirically has been enough to keep it from causing infections.

My wort chiller is one of those convoluted tubing, all copper chillers 
with the exception of some short plastic tubing and plastic quick 
disconnects on the wort in/out ports and the brass/plastic quick 
disconnects on the water in/out ports. The plastic prevents me from 
being able to sterilize this in the oven. (I think the oven should work 
fine otherwise.) At the end of brew day, I backflush and foreflush--is 
that a word?-- with a gallon of water just to get the bulk of sugar 
out. Hot water would be better, but I've often done this with just 
water from the tap. I then recirculate (backflush) a 1% NaOH solution 
through the unit with a pump while I'm cleaning up. I then rinse with 
another gallon of water and then briefly with a very dilute HCl 
solution just to neutralize the residual NaOH, and finally with a 
couple gallons of water. I then drain the chiller by rotating the coil 
to dump any trapped water I can and then put it on the shelf until the 
next brew day.

On brew day I usually just rinse it with a couple gallons of water, but 
recently I've started rinsing it with the extra water in my hot liquor 
tank. I suppose I could even crank this up to boiling. (Good idea, 
Fred! Write that down, Fred.)

I am not this casual about my other sanitization processes--some of you 
know that, but I really hate all the time it takes to do more with this 
heavy unit.

Hope this helps, and I welcome ideas from others out there.

Fred L Johnson
Apex, North Carolina, USA



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Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 08:32:18 -0500
From: "Alexandre Enkerli" <enkerli at gmail.com>
Subject: Chilling Infection

Matt (somewhere in Colorado) thoroughly investigated an infection
problem he was having. The evidence he has helps him designate his
counterflow chiller as the infecting culprit.

Perhaps too simple an idea but... Could you try using an immersion
chiller for a batch or two? Not that they're necessarily easier to
clean, of course. But you could get further support for the infecting
chiller hypothesis. And you might get a clean batch to drink, to
further convince you to brew regularly (as before the infection).
You could also tell us more about the effects of infection on your
beer. If some bottles were less infected than others, isn't it
possible that there is a further problem, here? If your brewery is
infected somewhere, the bacteria might have made their home in other
parts of the brewery (especially in tubing you might use).

- -- 
Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/


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Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:28:12 -0500
From: "David Lewinnek" <davelew at gmail.com>
Subject: re: infection and wort chillers

Matt in Colorado has a problem with an infected CFC that was heat-sterilized.

Matt, I worry that your solution of making a smoother CFC won't solve
your problem.  I think your problem might be that sterilizing
something by baking it a 350 F for an hour doesn't get it warm enough,
because air-to-copper heat exchange is simply not that efficient.
Although this is a silly example (and not exectly applicable to your
CFC), baking a small chicken at 350 for an hour will result in an
internal temperature of 150 to 160 in the white meat.  At 150 or 160,
most beer-infecting nasties will be deactivated, but they won't all
die.

You could test my theory that the CFC isn;t getting very hot by
putting a small amount of water into your CFC, baking it at 350 for an
hour, then seeing how much water boiled off.  My guess is not very
much, but this so easy to test that guessing is not really worthwhile.

I'm curious about the times you sterilized the CFC in boiling water.
That heat transfer should have been much more efficient, and at least
the ends of the CFC (where the inner tube is soldered tot he outer
shell) should have reached the boiling point of water at your
altitude.  That's why I worry that smoothing the ends of your CFC
won't help your your infection problem: it sounds like the infection
MIGHT be in the middle of your CFC, where the boiling water didn't
reach, at least not until after it was cooled by contact with a lot of
copper.

- --Dave Lewinnek


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Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:34:35 -0500 (EST)
From: jkleczewski at mindspring.com
Subject: 9th Annual UKG Drunk Monk Challenge

9th Annual UKG Drunk Monk Challenge

The Urban Knaves of Grain announce that the Drunk Monk Challenge 2007
will soon be upon us!  The competition is sanctioned by the American
Homebrewers Association, and is a qualifying event for MCAB and the
Midwest Homebrewer of the Year circuit. 

The competition is scheduled for March 09 and 10, 2007, to be held at
Walter Payton's Roundhouse in Aurora, IL.  As in previous years, the DMC
features the Menace of the Monastery, a special category consisting of
styles which are monastic in origin:  Belgian Blonde, Dubbel, Tripel,
Pale, Strong Golden and Strong Dark Ales, as well as German Doppelbock.

Of special note is that the winners of the Beer BOS and MOM will have the
opportunity to assist in the scaling up and brewing of their award-winning
recipe at Walter Payton's Roundhouse, of Aurora, IL, and Govnor's Public
House, of Lake In The Hills, IL. Please see rules for details.

Drunk Monk Challenge online entries are $7 for the first entry, and $5 each
additional entry; paper entries are $7 each.  Menace of the Monastery entries
are $5 each, ONLINE ONLY!

Entries will be accepted between February 19 and March 3. There are several
drop off locations in the Chicagoland area.

Full details, rules, entry forms, etc. can be found at the UKG website:
http://www.knaves.org/DMC/index.htm


Good luck and thanks!


Na Zdrowie,
John Kleczewski
2007 DMC organizer



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