Although I still have a few more brews to sneak in, I guess this will be the end of the year wrap up edition. I think it will be a two parter.

Not happy at all with the brewing this year. A lot of bad beers. And various reasons why. Right from the start of this years and the end of last years brew have bad. No way around it. Bad.

That damn plastic taste that plagued me before. Its like all of a sudden all my beers were made in a beach ball.

But like a sneaky virus, this problem eluded me for a long time. A very long time. Others were having kind of similar issues, so at first I chalked it up to a bad lot of yeast being sold. But after a while it became clear that that wasn't it.

Then I went back to the cause of the last time I had issues. The lines. I changed out all of my beverage lines. A few new batches thru them and nope. Not it.

After some more thought and tastings, it was pretty obvious that it was a chlorine or chloramine problem. But I have always used my campden tablets. After a bit of research and asking around, I came to find out that these tablets have a fairly short live span.

Things started making sense. I bought new tablets. And things were better. Much better. And after careful thought, I think this is how I solved the problem the first time as well, but I just didn't know it. 

Back when I had the first phenol attack, I finally solved the problem (or thought I did) by changing my lines. But now that I have been thinking about it,, I had bought new campden in that order as well because I had used all of what I had when I was making the rhubarb wines.

Ok. But I must admit that while this sure as hell solved a ton of problems,, there is still something going funny with my beer. Something again that I just cannot put my finger on. But I started doing something that made me take notice.

Bottling. I have been bottling a lot lately. And those beers DO NOT have the issue that my kegged beer does. Its not really a fault so to say,, but just…. something.

I have cleaned my kegs, changed rings, changed lines. I just don't know what it is. So what does my kegged beer have that my bottled beer don't, and something that I haven't changed. Bingo! The gas lines.

I took a look last night and it looks like I poured root beer in them and let it harden. I ordered more this morning. But how or when I got beer back up in there I do not know. But this has to be the problem.

Like I said, it took me a while to figure this out when it shouldn't have. But somethings go right past you. I'm glad I found out whats wrong, but it came a bit late, and have wasted a good chunk of time, money and beer. Most notably 2 batches of 1.100 beers. The Barleywine and the Imperial stout are just terrible. Almost undrinkable. Almost. I don't think I would survive the act of dumping them. I'm gonna drink these suckers no matter how long it takes.

Like I said I got it fixed and I'm ready to get to work on the 2015 TTO open beers. It should be interesting as I have a new outlook on both the contest itself and the beers I put in.

But that's another post.

end of part one. Part two next time: All the stuff I wanted to do this year, and what I actually did.