by OccultSynthetic » Mon Jul 18, 2022 1:37 am
Hey Matey,
Forgive me if I'm a noob here, but I come from a food science and beverage background.
The trouble with most things is that humans want to find the easiest and simplest way to understand something, sometimes at the expense of factual understanding.
In this case sanitation is like an iceberg, on the surface it seems like you must do it 100% of the time, and certainly for beginners as well as most commercial circumstances it is quite important, but after you gain more scientific knowledge and experience you may well recognise the times in which you can be lax in certain areas.
It heavily depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
Honestly, if I was trying to capture the nature of the input water I would not pasteurise, but you may well need to do so given the nature of microorganisms to produce certain molecules or enzymes to effectively fight with one another. (Google "killer yeast")
If you are aiming for 100% consistency, you should clean and sanitize all equipment preferment.
A good example:
I want to brew a Bohemian Pilsner, every step I will make sure that everything that touches beer (fermenter, lines, scissors that cut the liquid yeast pack, exterior of hop packet, keg, etc...)
is sanitised.
I pitch brand new yeast every single time to ensure the consistency of ferment.
In this case the purity of ferment as well as the ingredients is the overall focus, so I will ensure to make it difficult for there to be issues with ferment, storage, lagering.
Another example:
I want to brew and then distill a bourbon.
I care mostly about the input grain/s and want to ensure that I have a quick and thorough conversion of starches to sugar, as well as a very quick ferment.
I have a leftover portion of the undistilled mash leftover to innoculate my new mash with, of which will be rich with the yeast + bacterial culture that ferments my mash, in this case think of sourdough bread. Therefore I care considerably less if there are less sanitary conditions as I will be introducing a population if yeast + bacteria that will outcompete whatever is able to survive past the mash process.
TLDR:
Unfortunately there aren't broad strokes that you can apply to the logic that you use when approaching sanitation and cleaning with brewing/distilling. But moreso that there are reasons for approaching certain styles with more or less based on intent.