My Fermentation Smells Funny

• By thenoisethatwemade
• •
• 03 Sep, 2017
• •

My fermentation smells funny, yup, you read that right!

Thanks to Katie at Camra HQ a book entitled 'Camra's Home-Brewing Problem Solver' landed in my post box. As I run a bi-monthy home-brew group and am sporadically brewing myself, I was naturally interested in the subject. Written by founder and head brewer of Mystery Brewing Company, North Carolina - Erik Lars Myers with additional consultation from all round nice guy, Andy Parker from Elusive Brewing based in the UK. This is tapping into the brewing resurgence and is kind of like a home-brewing problem solver 101. With the format of the book starting at common issues or mistakes that a home-brewer may encounter on their journey. Cue titles like 'My fermentation smells funny' to 'My mash efficiency is low'.

On the surface I see the thinking behind the format, it's highlighting possible areas where things go wrong in home-brewing and working back, enabling the brewer to learn from their mistakes. It's a way we all learn through trial, error, then problem solving. The index page shifts gears through the various stages and so in a way follows the path of the brew day, fermentation, packaging and assessing your finished beer.  The writing is clear and easy to understand, there's no overly complex language and it makes for fairly straight forward use.

My only wonder is whether the pitch of the book is a little basic in some areas, so therefore it might only be relevant to a newbie home-brewer. Then once you've learned some of these issues and what not to do, you wouldn't really pick up this reference book.  Let's not forget the reach of the internet search browser and the multiple home-brew forums out there too, sharing a lot of these typical mistakes in thread form and interactive. I often check the Brew Your Own magazine forum for example (which is referenced in the back of the book under 'Further Resources').

I decided to try out the hypothesis and thought I'd live with the book whilst I had a brew on. The brew had been going for some time and to be honest reaching for the book over searching on the internet made for a nice change. I opened the book at the contents page and found 'Chapter Five: Fermentation' page 102 'Fermentation seems to last forever' jumped out. The flutter and feel of the matte pages, a nice sensation, especially for a bibliophile like myself. There were three possible explanations and a talk through the solutions to run through each one. All made sense, so it was a matter of practically trying each solution to come to a reasonable answer.

 

There's eight chapters and 100 headers, so it's pretty comprehensive, it's like the best bits of all those home-brew forum threads. So in a way it's condensed all the problem solving into a more easy to find and follow manual. I may keep this one on my bookshelf,  within easy to reach distance of the demijohn....

 

(Disclosure:  A sample book was gifted from CAMRA. Opinions expressed here are my own).