Common Home Brew Beer Kit Problems
Why Didn’t My Beer Work?
When you’re learning how to make beer, it could take a few batches before you begin to get comfortable with the entire homebrewing operation. Using a the best beer kit you can will help eliminate some of the variables, particularly if you’re a beginner, but not all of them. Whenever you do encounter troubles, step back and analyze your brewing process . Attempt to distinguish one thing you could have gotten incorrect, and alter that. Only change one thing – if you switch a bunch of things, you will never recognize what worked. Be observant, and you will be capable of solving what failed, and as you’ll be able to see, just about anything that arises while you are finding out how to make beer is easily fixable. Let’s take a look at the most basic problems found with homebrew beer kits and what their causes and answers are.
Homebrew is Cloudy
The first thing is clearness. Most homebrew isn’t clear – it’s cloudy or has small pieces swimming in it. Actually, this is just the nature of beer – most commercial breweries use filtering agents to clarify their beer, and the fact is in that respect there is nothing wrong with it unfiltered. Even so, there constitutes a point where there’s just a bit much stuff in there, or it has moved from “cloudy” to “murky.” This can be caused by two things. Poor sanitizing can contribute to bacterial infection, so make certain you abide by proper procedure for sanitizing. Also, if you do not chill your wort down rapidly after boiling and get the yeast in, you wind up leaving it out to cool down and impurities can enter, so get that yeast in as promptly as you are able to – many brewers use an immersion wort chiller to fix this problem.
Beer Not Carbonated
Next issue – you open up the bottle and there’s no foam. It could taste all right, but personally I attempt to avoid flat beer. No carbonation is commonly caused by not adding an adequate amount of sugar at the priming/bottling point, but there are other causes. If you do not thoroughly rinse the sanitizer from the fermenter, it can kill your hopes of carbonation. Rinse a lot of times. Also, if you put your homebrew beer in a location to ferment that’s excessively cold – below 64 degrees is risky – it will not do it’s thing. Remember, yeast is active. It needs to be warm and happy remain that way.
Beer Tastes Bad
What if everything appears fine, and there are bubbles, but your beer just tastes “off”? There are many different classifications of “off-tasting,” everything from skunky to yeasty to acidic, but let’s go with “this beer simply does not taste good.” Once more, this is generally the consequence of distressed yeast. Either it was not fermented long enough, or it wasn’t left to bottle condition long enough, so the process wasn’t completed. This can also be the consequence of the aforesaid not cooling down the wort rapidly enough and it getting infected because it sat around for a while. One other cause – clear bottles. Light can have a bad outcome on beer, so keep it in the dark and use brown or green bottles.
Beer Bottle Explosions
And now the biggest of all “issues” – exploding bottles. This is in reality the most common problem and the easiest to diagnose and remedy. The main reasons it occurs are overpriming (adding a bit much sugar prior to bottling your homebrew) and premature bottling. You really need to make certain the primary fermentation is all over. Don’t rush it. Also, poor sanitizing can lead to bacterial infection(starting to see a trend with this one?) that can cause bad things to happen to you. Proper sanitation is one of the keys making good homebrew beer, and something you should make a good habit when you’re learning how to make beer at home.
Occasionally you believe you did everything right, but it still comes out incorrect. This is especially true if you’re still learning how to make beer at home, but do not look upon it as the sole dominion of the beginner homebrewer – it occurs to more experienced brewers from time to time, too. Homebrew beer is a great deal like Goldilocks from the familiar tale – it has several standards that need to be “just right” for it to work – not perfect, but there’s an satisfactory range you need to arrive at across several parameters. Sometimes, for whatever reason, this just does not happen. Learn from your mistakes and do not give up – it happens to the best of us.
Be sure to read our Reviews of the best beer kits, so you can make an informed decision about which homebrew beer kit will best suit your needs. Then head to our store and get the one you want. We make it easy for you – everything you need, all in one place!
