Bug Brewing – Dedicated Equipment

While it is a good idea to have different equipment it is not a necessity. I do quite a few sours, all brett beers, and wild fermentations and do not have a single piece of equipment that is dedicated to sours.

The bacteria that are in sours are all over everything you touch, they are in the air and they come in contact with your "clean" brewing equipment between brew sessions. Adequate sanitation (scrubbing, iodophor, bleach+acid, etc) takes care of everything

All that said, if you are still paranoid, some new tubing for a racking cane and a racking cane are relatively inexpensive. You definitely do not need to separate your kegging equipment, its SS!

 

This is a good question, and I have always wondered about this too after finding out that Vinnie Cilurzo has all seperate equipment for his wild beers.

As for personal experience, I have never brewed a sour, but I have a buddy who brews a great deal of sour beers and doesn't use any separate equipment as far as I know. To this point he hasn't had any issues, I would just make sure you are diliegent with your cleaning and sanitation like ryane mentioned.

 

I have a separate bottling bucket for sours, and that is it. I use Better Bottles for everything. As long as you practice good cleaning and sanitation, you're good. The only thing I don't cross over is HDPE like bucket plastics as they are easier to scratch if you aren't careful, and scratches can harbor bacteria where sanitizers can't get.

 

Some of these aren't necessary, but I have separate:

Fermenters (glass can scratch too after all)
Kegs (just can't be bothered changing all the gaskets and filling with boiling water)
Keg quick connects / hoses
Plastic Funnel
Plastic Measuring Cup
Plastic Autosiphon
Plastic Buckets (1 for starsan, 1 for pbw)
Airlocks / Stoppers / Blow Off Tubes
Carboy Brush

 

P.S. I just recently began making sour beers myself and haven't really started to dispense them yet. So I will be adding the following items to my list above:

bottles (the thicker kind)
bottling wand
bottling bucket
dispensing hoses
picnic faucet
another blichmann beer gun

I know the beer gun could be properly cleaned / sanitized and used to switch btw sours and non-sours but again I really can't be bothered to do so every time.

 

All post-boil plastic must be dedicated to funky beers. If you've been brewing for a while, just delegate your current plastics to sours (you prob need new plastics for your clean beers).

 

that's quite a definitive statement. i don't agree with it, but you're not wrong either.
there is no "must". and i'd argue that unscratched food-grade plastic is likely fine.
i haven't had an infection in 2+ years. i wipe my plastic stuff and don't scrub/scratch. i've been a-ok to date.

 

What are ya'lls sanitation practices with better bottles?

I do PBW soak -> hot water rinse x3 -> StarSan soak.

 

I don't have separate equipment, however I do sanitize everything that can take it with 190F water between 'buggy' and 'clean' and hit carboys with a little bleach before finishing with Star San. This includes pushing the hot water through kegs and tap lines. My only unintended infections came from two recycled Jolly Pumpkin bottles that were not adequately sanitized before bottling a pale ale. They tasted great, just not what I was aiming for. All other bottles were fine so this 'contamination' was actually a treat.

 

I don't think I ever soak anything in Star San. I'll use a spray bottle just before equipment touches the wort/beer.

 

Well better bottles don't clean so easily (without a carboy brush) in my limited experience and a starsan soak can only help....

 

I challenge you to brew something clean and age as you would a sour. Bet it'd be a bit funky.

 

Perhaps, but if you drink the clean beer quickly, ie. pale ale, you shouldn't have a problem, given proper cleaning and sanitation. Even if a few bugs do make it past your cleaning and sanitation, the amount of wild yeast or bacteria cells would be incredibly miniscule compared to the big yeast starter of sacch you pitch. If you would see any noticeable wild character, it would most likely be after quite a few months and more likely in bottles that sit warm than a keg that sits at 30's/40's F.

 

I don't have any illusions that I, myself, can brew a clean beer. Of the 24 batches I did in 2013, 10 were "clean" - and only one of those is still around. I keg and drink my "clean" beers quickly.

 

and you're basing this on what? science? you're one-off experience? read the Bruery's blog. they recently had an infection issue and they're not sure what it's from. and that is recent and with about 10 variables that could have caused it.

if you're so worried about plastic permeability, then you should worry about the lactobacillus that's found naturally on grains. or brettanomyces that's found in the air. or mould. all of it is there.

or let's go one step further. you brew brett beer. use brett brux trois, bret lambicus, brett brux, brett anomalus. all of these lovely strains of brett. you use dedicated equipment for brett. why aren't you worried about cross contamination between the brett strains. shouldn't that be a problem? wouldn't that affect the taste of all of your beer?

if i owned a brewery, i'd definitely have a separate fermentor for my brett beer. the only reason is quality assurance and cost of dumping barrels and barrels of beer. but, again, i don't know if there's science to back that up. while brett definitely is harder to purge than sacc, i think that people go a little too nuts over it at times.

 

you said sanitation but included washing so: I do a PBW soak but have ruined them before with too long a soak. And I mix the PBW in a bucket first, to avoid super saturated solution at the bottom of the BB as it dissolves. After a half hour or so I pour the PBW into the next PBW (I clean several at a time) and soak the first one in hot water. then a rinse and set aside to dry until needed.

stubborn krausen ring? I'll give them longer with the PBW but will invert it into a bucket to get the solution off the bottom of the BB. then some paper towels in there and shake the shit out of it to get any stubborn residue. The narrow opening of the BB and inability to easily reach in there and clean that area just below the shoulder is the only thing I do not like about them.

 

I bet Bruery's plastics are all separate. I don't think you'd find a commercial brewery that mixes hoses and stuff between clean and funky beers.

Why are you getting all hyped? You're the one who initiated the back and forth. I thought Canadians were supposed to be chill.

 

you're one weird dude.

and you can read over what the Bruery did. http://bruery.blogspot.ca/2013/12/beer-issues-cacaonut-barrel-aged-autumn-maple-praecocia.html

 

Everyone knows everything I guess, to hell with humility and all of its' vulnerability!