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Did you know that sulphite is not strong enough to kill bacteria and therefore is of no use in beermaking?

I typically make wine and therefore use a metabisulphite solution to clean my equipment and to date have had no issues with my batches. I should point out though that I’m pretty fussy about keeping my equipment clean, especially when storing it between batches!

I was surprised to read in the cleaning instructions that came with the Brew House beer kit from RJ Spagnols that sulphites shouldn’t be used to clean beer making equipment as they can’t kill bacteria, which will alter the taste of the beer and also opens up the possibility that you’ll get sick from your beer - not good!

I have to say though that I was quite impressed with the cleaning instructions that they included with the kit as they give four cleaning options: Trisodium Phosphate (aka T.S.P. - i.e. the stuff you clean your walls with before you paint them), Diversol (aka Sani-Brew - i.e. the pink solution commonly used in beer/wine making), Bleach (i.e. aka the stuff you use to whiten your shirts) and Iodophor (aka Iodine).

My personal preference is Sani-Brew as it has bleach in it (so I know it’s a good disinfectant) and works well when removing stains from your equipment (especially for your primary - great when you are brewing several different types of wines/beers out of the same container).

Here’s a the page on RJ Spagnol’s website that goes into greater detail about cleaning your equipment as well as the differences between four types of cleansers that they recommend. Definitely worth checking out (even if to serve as a refresher):

www.RJSjspagnols.com/resource_view.asp?HandoutID=44

I realize that cleaning your equipment is one of the least favourite jobs when making beer or wine but consider this interesting thought from RJ Spagnols:

“If you get tired of scrubbing and sanitizing, remember: lapses in sanitation are responsible for 90% of all homebrewing failures. You can avoid them.”

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”

Thought I would pass along an interesting tidbit of information I learned this morning about home made beer - the easiest way to eliminate the sediment at the bottom of the bottle of home made beer.

As a wine maker I assumed that the sediment was from dead yeast that hadn’t settled out from the fermentation process and that the only way to get rid of the sediment was to filter it - after all, don’t the commercial beer makers filter their beer?

It turns out (after a chat with a fellow customer who I met this morning at one of the local wine making supply store that I frequent) that I was right that the sediment is from dead yeast, but I was wrong in terms of where it came from.

The typical way to carbonate your beer is by adding sugar to your beer before you bottle it (you can also add carbonation tabs to each bottle as well). The sugar re-energizes the yeast in the beer and restarts the fermentation thereby producing carbon dioxide naturally. The sediment that you see in the bottom of the bottle is therefore the dead yeast from this round of fermentation.

The easiest way to avoid this sedimentation, therefore, is to use a different method of adding carbon dioxide to your beer! To do this you’ll need to use a kegging system such as the one used in your local pub or you can purchase one of those “Tap-A-Draft” systems I mentioned in my previous post “Suggestions On How To Carbonate your Beer, Sparkling Wine or Wine Cooler“.

It’s just a matter of time before I purchase the “Tap-A-Draft”!

Honey Blond Ale

For those of you who like a honey beer like Sleeman’s Honey Brown Lager, I think I might have found a kit that you should give a try. RJ Spagnols, who is known for their wine kits also has a line of beer kits called “The Brew House“.

They have a honey beer called “Honey Blonde Ale” that is similar to Sleeman’s but the owner of the store said that if you wanted to “kick it up a notch” to add 1/2 kg of unpasteurized honey along with a kettle full of boiling water to the primary before you added your water and beer wort.

Sounded very interesting so thought I would give it a go. Haven’t made this brand of kit before but it comes highly recommended. If you have any experience with them please leave a comment!

Here are some tasting and technical notes for The Brew House’s Honey Blonde Ale:

STYLES AND HISTORY
A refreshingly smooth, full-bodied ale with a touch of all natural honey to create a slightly sweet finish. Golden in colour, with a rich, soft and round palate, we use pure clover honey to balance the satisfying ale character.

FOOD AND SOCIAL
It pairs extremely well with classic summer fare, such as cold fruit or fresh leaf lettuce salads but also has the resilience to stand up to most strongly flavoured foods like char-grilled meats and pizzas.

Enjoy!

- Scott “The Beer & Wine Making Guy”

I thought I would switch gears for this Blog post as I not only make wine but I also make beer. Mind you, my story from this weekend can easily apply to wine making so if you only make wine read on!

I’m in the process of making a tasty Mexican Cerveza and this is just in time for patio weather in my neck of the woods. Since it is a Mexican beer I wanted to get some Corona bottles - I also figured they would be much easier to clean as they don’t have any labels to deal with.

I’m not sure how bottles are recycled in your part of the world but here in Alberta we have privately owned bottle depots where you bring all of your empties and in return you get your deposit back. I figured this would be the best place to get Corona bottles as they get them every day and I certainly wasn’t disappointed - although I had to explain to them several times why I wanted them as my request was certainly out of the norm.

In any event, we haggled a bit and before too long I was the proud owner of 6 dozen used, sludgy and empty bottles of Corona!

The biggest surprise though came after I started pulling the bottles out of the case as some of them were pretty disgusting - some had big chunks of mold at the bottom while another had a dead mouse! Yuck!

In retrospect I should have taken pictures of some of these bottles for your viewing pleasure but unfortunately I didn’t think of it until just now. You can trust me though when I say that they were pretty gross …

Typically bottle cleaning is the bain of most wine or beer maker’s existence and they typically leave this part to the very last minute but I knew how dirty these bottles were going to be so wanted to plan ahead.

My wife Michelle and I plan on bottling the beer this coming Saturday and wanted to get things done well in advance so came up with a 5-part plan of attack:

Step 1 - Pre-rinse the bottles with a jet bottle washer so that we can clean out the sludge, mold … and dead mice.

Step 2 - Disinfect with “Sani Brew” for 5 days (note typically doing this over night is fine but figured we’d do it longer since we had the time). We have a large primary that a friend donated that so happens to be perfect for holding 6 dozen bottles of beer or 30 bottles of wine. If you don’t have one of these then consider going out and purchasing a big green plastic garbage can.

It’s worth noting that the Sani Brew has bleach in it so you are best to cover your sanitizing bucket with a blanket or towel so you can contain the bleach “aroma”.

Step 3 - Double rinse the bottles with fresh water to get the Sani Brew detergent out of the bottles (remember that Sani Brew has chlorine in it so isn’t exactly digestion friendly and therefore it is definitely worth over doing it on the rinsing part at this stage).

Step 4 - Sterilizing with a metabisulphite solution using a “sulfiter”.

Step 5 - More rinsing then we’re good to go!

(As a side note, I’ve read some posts where people use their oven to disinfect their bottles using heat, however bottles aren’t used to the heating and cooling so will fatigue and break. )

It is also worth pointing out that if you’re saving your used beer or wine bottles for future batches that you can save yourself a lot of grief by rinsing the bottles out with warm clean water shortly after you have used them then storing them upside down in a wine or beer bottle case so that dust (or mice) don’t collect inside them.

Hope this helps. Best of luck!

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”

Ever had difficulty opening one of those wine kit bags?

This video will show you a tool that will make this finger nail breaking task so much easier!

Now normally this Blog is reserved for topics relating to wine making but I thought I’d take a moment and discuss something more on the environmental end of things - Earth Hour!

I had heard something briefly on the news the other day about it but didn’t pay too close attention to it.

Then I was attending a business luncheon today and the main topic was relating to “Earth Hour”.

Since this was the second time I’d heard about in as many days I felt it was fate giving me a swift kick in the “behind” and telling me to pay attention!

When I got home from work today I told my wife about it and she quickly agreed that she wanted to participate as well.

So What Is “Earth Hour” Anyways?

Last year 2.3 million of our friends in Sydney, Australia turned off their lights simultaneously for 1 hour (coordinated by WWF-Australia) to show that it’s possible to take action on climate change.

The Result?

According to WWF-Australia, there was a 10% reduction on the electrical grid, saving 25,000 tonnes of CO2, which is the equivalent of taking approximately 50,000 cars off the road for an hour. Not bad!

Due to the success of the event last year the WWF (World Wildlife Foundation) is promoting this across the world this month and hopes that you’ll participate as well!

To participate all you have to do is sign up at www.EarthHour.org and commit to turning off your lights at 8pm (local time) till 9pm on Saturday, March 29th (i.e. this coming Saturday).

You can also promote this to your friends and colleagues at work, as well as consider what else you can do in your home and at work to drive change in behaviour and practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Why Participate?

Participating in Earth Hour is a simple way to show that you want to be a part of the solution and sends a powerful message to others that, together, we can make a difference.

To Learn More About Earth Hour

Please visit www.earthhour.org to commit to turning your light’s off for one hour Saturday night and to learn more about this cool “little” event that the WWF is putting on.

You can also download a short 2-page summary of the event by going to:

www.wwf.ca/EarthHour/downloads/WWF_EH_Summary.pdf

If you are planning on participating I’d be interested to hear on Sunday how things went.

At the very least this is a great opportunity to have that romantic candle lit dinner with your “better half” that you’ve been thinking about doing for a while …

Have fun!

- Scott

Home Wine Making Blog: When you think about a wine you normally don’t think of it in terms of being in a good mood, humorous or even under-the-weather, but there is a term used by the wine industry that might make you think that such terms are appropriate.

Bottle sickness is often used to describe a wine that has taken a plunge in quality, usually right after bottling. It is referred to as a ’sickness’ because the effects are temporary and with a little rest the wine will come back to its good-ole self once again.

Bottle sickness (also referred to as ‘bottle shock’ or ‘travel shock’) occurs when the wine absorbs too much oxygen in too little time, something that is likely to happen during bottling. Wines can handle the slow, gradual infusion of air that is naturally allowed by wine corks. In fact, most red wines will benefit from such a scenario, but when the oxygen comes too fast a build-up of an element called acetaldehyde starts to become prevalent in the wine.

Acetaldehyde is naturally found in any wine, at least in small, unnoticeable amounts, but in higher amounts its presence can be detected as an odor of rotting apples or nuts. This is what’s noticed in wines that are suffering from bottle shock. The overall impression the wine gives can be described as flat or flabby, or just plain lacking in fruitiness.

Over the course of time the acetaldehyde will slowly convert to alcohol, bringing the wine back into line with something enjoyable to drink. How long this takes depends on the severity of the sickness. It could be as little as a few days or as long as a few weeks.

This is just one more reason of many as to why aging is so important. You could pick up a newly bottled wine from your cellar one week and wonder why it’s so lifeless then the next week be overwhelmed by its superb flavor.

Natural stoppers are renewable resource: WWF

Mike De Souza, CanWest News Service

Published: Monday, October 22

OTTAWA - The average person probably won’t know what it is when they take a sip of their favourite wine.

In fact, many wouldn’t even notice the mouldy taste, sometimes compared to dirty socks, in their glass. But for wine-tasting experts, who could detect it in concentrations as low as one or two parts per trillion, a small sip would leave a bad taste in their mouths.
“It’s not really a safety issue. It’s not a health issue. It’s a quality issue and it’s costing the industry millions and millions of dollars,” said Dr. George Soleas, a chemist who has spent more than a decade in the Canadian wine industry.

Poor-quality natural corks are the source of the problem, according to industry experts, who blame the faulty stoppers for tainting wine with trichloroanisole (TCA) and ruining some of the best bottles on the market. A recent American industry estimate pegged losses at up to $250 million a year.

But environmentalists are mounting a campaign to defend the natural cork, arguing the alternative solutions have dirty environmental footprints.

“It’s very simple,” said Chantal Menard, a spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund in Europe.

“If you use cork, you use a renewable resource, which is not the case for aluminum used in screw caps, and it’s also not the case for oil or petrol, which is used for making synthetic stoppers.”

Natural cork is harvested from the cork oak tree, which grows mainly in European and North African countries such as Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

Harvesters strip the bark of a mature tree that is at least 25 years old. When done properly, there is no need to cut down trees and the bark grows back in about a decade.

Soleas, also the vice-president of quality assurance at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, concedes that high-quality natural cork is still the best option for wine drinkers who want to store their bottles for a few years. The synthetic and screw caps block oxygen from entering the bottle and allowing the wine to age.
But since most customers consume their wine within a year, he said the Ontario liquor board favours the alternative stoppers to eliminate the risk of TCA tainting and its impact on sales.

Soleas defended the use of alternative closures, noting synthetic stoppers and aluminum screw caps can be recycled.

A peer-reviewed study in 2002 by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario tested 2,400 wines and found that 32 per cent of bottles with a low-grade composite cork closure were tainted with TCA. Six per cent of bottles with high-quality natural corks were found to be tainted, while none of the bottles with synthetic closures or screw caps were.

“Although you don’t often get customer returns, because the majority of the customers don’t know what the smell is, they just don’t like the wine and they’ll never buy it again,” Soleas said.

The tainting problem from natural corks has caused a major shift for wine-makers over the past few years, according to Stephane Rein, a wine industry consultant in France.

While 95 per cent of wine bottles had natural corks in 2001, five years later more than a quarter of bottles used alternative closures, Rein said — about 19 per cent used synthetic cork closures and 7.5 per cent used screw caps.

“It’s a very dynamic market and there’s a lot of controversy,” said Rein.

But he praised the WWF campaign as ” an excellent initiative. … It asks people to be conscious of the whole chain of production. They should know that when they buy cork, it won’t have an impact on the forest.”

The industry is starting to address the rapid rise of alternative closures and their impact on the environment, said Chris Thomson, the national sales manager in Canada for Cork Supply USA Inc.

“Of the three, natural cork is the most preferential in terms of doing the least amount of harm,” said Thomson, whose company produces and distributes a variety of natural and alternative closures.

© The Edmonton Journal 2007