You may remember the other day I posted a poll here asking you whether you’ve ever had an infected beer and if you had a beer get infected on more than 1 or 2 occasions. I mentioned in that post that I’ve never had an infected batch but only a bottle or two so I thought it’d be interesting to see how many other brewers have had a similar experience. Well now it’s time to take a look at the results.
Just How Common are Home Brew Infections?
Although it’s not a massive response at the moment there are 37 votes on the poll (I’ll leave it running so if you haven’t voted you can do so if you wish). So here’s the gist of it:
- Out of those 37 responses only a single brewer has had an infected batch on more than one or two occasions. I’ll say I’m pretty impressed at that result
- Roughly half of the remaining brewers that responded had an infected batch of beer once or twice since they started brewing
- The other half had never had an infected beer This is pretty good stuff!
Now this isn’t the most concise or bulletproof poll ever created in fact it could do with more criteria like how many beers you’ve made or how bad the infection was. Never the less if you take a look at the results it seems pretty rare to have ongoing problems with infected beers. I would guess that once you’ve had one batch go wrong you’re not keen on letting the same thing happen to any more brews in the future which would explain half the brewers have only had the one infection.
Does this Mean It’s Difficult To Get An Infection?
I would say no, I think the reason for this result is because people are educated, pretty much every single book, resource or article written about brewing now has sanitation pretty much as the first step of making a beer. Brewers know that it’s important and if they don’t it only takes one batch going down the drain to reinforce that. That’s my theory anyway, let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks to everyone who has responded if you want to vote click here.
