We’ve been trying to drink up the Beeston Castle porter, which has turned out to be a bit of a problem. I’ve just checked back on previous blogs posts, and it seems that I didn’t write an article about this brew. We made it back in May 2012, with the plan to bottle all of it and lay it down for a few months.
But we’ve had a real problem with carbonation. About a third of the bottles have carbonated nicely and are, frankly, delicious. The remaining two third are totally flat and have a nasty oxidised taste.
So we’ve had to designate it “for brewery consumption only”, because we can’t give any bottles away with a hit rate like that. It just needs drinking up and the bad ones disposing of, which is rather a shame. (Although I have saved a couple of bottles for steak and ale pies! :-)
We’re not exactly sure what the cause of the problem is. My best guess is that it was a faulty batch of crown corks. I would guess that the bad ones have not quite sealed properly, which has lead to no carbonation and a little oxygen getting in. If that’s the case, it’s a hell of a problem, because how to do tell when you are bottling a brew whether the crown corks are OK? I’m going to ditch the remaining corks from that bag just in case, but it does worry me for future brews.
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