I haven’t yet posted about bottling my 3B2 beer. In part I’ve been a bit busy, in part I’m a bit disappointed and, in part, those two things fit together. I first cooked up this recipe about a year ago (see 3B) after a batch I had to discard; 3B was partly a nod to the Arkells 3B recipe it was based on but also a reminder that I needed to get Back to the Basics of Brewing and the result was excellent. One of the basics in my set up is that the beer seems to ferment in 3-4 days and I really need to make time to bottle it the following weekend.

I left the 3B2 for a couple of weeks and was also a bit slapdash with the temperature monitoring. It didn’t develop the kind of pellicule I had before but there was definitely one starting and the beer was starting to taste sour (unlike the gravity sample I’d drawn the weekend before and kept sealed up to monitor – that was possibly when I introduced the infection). I didn’t realise about the taste until after I’d finished bottling (it came from a sample of what was leftover) so I now need to wait to see what time does to it.

For the next batch, I’ll make sure I thoroughly sanitise everything and, before I begin to brew, I’ll make sure there is time in my diary to bottle the following week.