Green Lobster

I’ve been switching to those new compact fluorescent light bulbs. It’s not like I’m such an environmentalist, it’s the promise of saving money and not having to hassle with changing bulbs.

I mean, in another month or two, I might have changed my last light bulb in this house. I could easily have sold it and moved by the time one of these burn out, and that’s something I wouldn’t have thought with a Realtor’s sign in my front yard.

So what’s all this got to do with a carboy wearing a t-shirt? Glad you asked.

Fluorescent bulbs may be all that and a pat on the fanny as far as energy consumption goes, but they emit harmful ultraviolet light. The t-shirt functions, in this case, like a little ozone layer.



First off, you know that skunky smell in beer? Usually found in beer packaged in green or clear glass? That’s mercaptan, (I think butyl mercaptan, but don’t hold me to it, there’s more than one kind), and it’s exactly the same thing in skunks spray. It occurs in beer when UV rays hit isomerized alpha acids, the stuff that preserves beer from spoilage and gives it bitterness.

Beer that’s packaged in clear or green glass? I’ll only buy it when I can get an unopened case or a six pack from a case that hasn’t been opened before I got to the liquor store. You’d be okay with Miller High Life, in that they use a modified hop extract to avoid the problem, but Miller High Life isn’t so much a beer as an advertising campaign contaminated with traces of beer.

I used to wonder why stores put fluorescent fixtures in. It just didn’t seem to make sense: Beer is clearly the most important food in our diets, and if we know fluorescents ruin beer, why don’t we use incandescent bulbs?

Of course, it’s because it would use more electricity and the bulbs burn out faster, and in commerce those things count for a lot more than in a personal dwelling.

Time was when I’d have used beer quality as an excuse to stick hard by the incandescent in my home. I wouldn't buy a house on a slab, but not because I cared about the safety of my family. Having a good place to brew meant having a basement, and that's the real reason I insisted on one, not that we live in Tornado Alley and a basement might save us.

No, I’m not exaggerating for effect. I should have insisted on a walkout basement, and next time I will.



So back to our t-shirt. This is a post about draping shirts over carboys full of beer, cider and mead.

When it’s time to rack, bottle, or keg a batch of beer, I move the carboy to the kitchen counter about a day ahead of time. This is to allow the sediment to resettle after moving, so I can rack the beverage off the gunk. But that means letting lots of UV rays hit the contents, both from the windows (sunlight is the worst: if you want to refresh your memory on that skunk thing, pour pretty much any beer into a clear glass and set it in direct sunlight for fifteen minutes or so) and from the fluorescent fixture in the kitchen, and now even compact fluorescent bulbs all around.



If you’re wondering how a cider or mead would get skunked, since they aren’t made with hops, there’s a second danger from UV: yeast mutation. I picked this up in some text or other over the years, probably Rajotte’s ‘First Steps in Yeast Culture’ or Noonan’s ‘New Brewing Lager Beer.’ Since I often re-pitch a culture, I fear getting something funky going.