homebrewandbeer.com

I hate the white skin infection. Not always fatal, but it's a real bugger; undermines my confidence in the beer so I still don't enjoy it even if it does escape unscathed. It's the only infection that I get; it's affected about 4 of my brews now. I think it comes from having too many insects in the house.

....I hear you. I have a fellow brewer around the other night, having a look at the setup and whilst I was rabbiting on about sanitising everything and cleanliness is god, yada yada, he grabbed one of my empty / clean kegs and looked in to see a cockroach running around the bottom of the keg!!

Cheers,
TL

Yeah, apparently humans and cockroaches are crossing paths in Southern Australia more and more these days. It's to do with the drought; they're after the water that we have in the house. One good thing is that a lot of the cockroaches that we're seeing these days are actually native ones, and they don't carry disease the same way that the introduced species do. They normally just live in the garden and eat decaying herbaceous matter much like a slater. Here is a photo of the type of Australian native cockroach that I've been seeing a lot recently:



They can be identified by the white stripe down the sides. Somehow, being native and not spreading disease reduces my hatred of them to only a mild-dislike. Of course, they all carry the bacteria that are the source of our beer infections, and once they start breeding, the nymphs are very small and can get almost anywhere.