Contamination question

Hi

Having read many posts on this forum, about various things. I saw on a couple of occasions a link to the HBD Pale experiment.
I am not sure if this has been raised or answered previously, however, the one part of this experiment that concerns me (as a newbie) are the columns "contamination" and "primary contaminant".
It appears about 1/3rd are clear, 1/3 are mild moderate, the rest severely contaminated. Am i to believe that some of these people were careless with sanitisation? Or is this just showing real life? For example, if I am doing all i can to clean & sanitise equipment, will i still get contaminants like those shown, and this is this all just part of the profile of beer brewing (home or professional)anyway?

If anybody has info on the sterility of their beer (has anybody ever done microbiology tests)? I would be keen to know their results.
Am I worrying over nothing? I just don't like the sound of pedios in my beer

Mally

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Thanks for that link Kartoffel,

That has give me a lot more insight into the contamination issue.

What surprises me in that article is that the best tasting beer (albeit by a limited number of testers) was an infected one. Which leads me to believe that it is possible to have infected beer but be unaware of it!

I still don't know whether i should be concerned or not yet, but i guess from the fact that nobody has died from infected beer (that i know of) I should just stick to what i am doing, and only worry if the beer tastes too bad to drink.

BTW, thanks for everybody elses input

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I wouldn't be too worried about this mally. In this test, they create an environment where any infections can grow freely in ideal conditions, that is one week on an agar plate. So, the results are exaggerations if you like. In reality, your beer does not give these bugs ideal conditions. For example, pH of your beer keeps most bugs to very small numbers.

One thing to be careful of is that if you ever brew a sour beer, do it about 50 miles away from your normal brewing area and never let the fermentor anywhere near your 'normal' fermentors or kegs. Those sour infections can totally over-run your brewery. I had one mate over here who ended up only being able to brew sour beers just because of this .

thughes just posted a link in this post to some great pics of sour beer wort. If you can drink the results of that stuff, I reckon you can drink anything .

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