I have a situation where my wife was helping me clean my bottles for my last batch of beer.
I washed the bottles with hot water, then ran them through the dishwasher (without the drying cycle) Then I sanitized them using Five Star sanitizer.
I filled my five gallon bottling bag thing with water and added 1oz. of sanitizer per instructions and filled each bottle with the sanitzer while my wife poured them out a few minutes later. I noticed she was letting it glug out of the bottles causing the sanitizer water to get sudsy inside the bottles so I told her to pour it out slow to avoid all the suds. She had only done this to 5 or 6 bottles.
Then I drained out the bottling bag thing and noticed there were suds in it too (not much though) so I went against the sanitizer instructions and rinsed it out enough to get the suds out.
My problem now is I have been "sampling" a bottle here and there as they are conditioning. I had two last night the first one was great, this is probably my best batch yet (it's a McMenamin's Hammerhead Ale Clone (Lotsa Cascade Hops)). But the second one had a different taste to it and was a bit foamy. I think that I must have gotten one of the 5 or 6 bottles that had sanitizer residue in it, which doesn't make sense to me because we let them dry before I filled them and it says on the sanitizer bottle not to rinse. I knew that those few bottles had the suds in them but just assumed that since you are not supposed to rinse, it would have evaporated or something.
I am alive and well today to tell the story but I don't want to make anybody sick or wonder why 1 beer is foamy and the next is not. We make this stuff to share right? :)
I don't plan on doing much more bottling, I want to switch to kegs but I would like to know if this is something I did wrong or just crappy sanitizer?
And should I try and weed out those foamy brews? or maybe even scrap the whole batch? (I don't know if I could bring myself to do that.)
Thanks,
Luke McAllister