Is this "Band-Aid" taste because I used C-Brite?

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jsweet

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One of the last jobs I did before switching to Starsan was bottling this pale ale... which tasted great at bottling time, but now I am getting this Band-Aidy tasty. The Palmer book says this can be caused by both chlorophenols and by wild yeast, but I doubt the latter because a) no gushing, b) it seems to affect all bottles, and c) this beer is nice and clear. The medicinal taste is there in the smell too. I soaked the bottles in C-Brite immediately before bottling, and then rinsed them a few times each with a bottle washer before bottling. Did I really just ruin 63 decent pale ales because of a $%&^ing bleach-based sanitizer?!
 
So various more comments... before Revvy jumps in, yes this beer is a little green. 21 days in the fermenter, 14 days in the bottle at room temperature, 1 day in the fridge. But like I say, it's crystal clear, and it tasted great at bottling time. This is more than just a mild off-flavor; this is a real punch in the mouth of medicinal/Band-Aid taste. The head retention is good, the carbonation is good, the balance of malt and bitterness is good... all the things I figure will mellow with time are okay. It's just this strong, so-strong-you-can't-possibly-miss-it Band-Aid flavor that is messing it all up...

I may have oxygenated it at bottling time too (that's another story) but it doesn't taste like wet cardboard to me... Man, I dunno...
 
It's could be an infection. Gushing or cloudiness is not always part of a bacterial or wild yeast intrusion. Another cause could be a higher than normal temp during fermentation.
 
During fermentation, it did spike a fever of about 78deg before I could cool it down with ice. I fermented with Safale 05.
 
I used S-04, and may have had some hot fermentation temps (I don't think ambient ever got above 71 -- I may have pitched hot though). The thing is, this taste was not present in the hydrometer sample I took at bottling time, so I'm thinking it had to have been something after...
 
Okay, so after some more searching, I'm guessing it's not the C-Brite. I rinsed rather than air-dried, but in any case it should not be this pronounced I don't think.

I wonder if it's the bottling bucket... I got some of my homebrew supplies (including the bottling bucket) used from my old boss. His wife said when he tried to brew it had a very unpleasant funny taste to it... I'm wondering if there is a stubborn infection in the spigot or something? Seems weird though that it would infect all the bottles from just passing through there briefly.. Although, I've only tried 2 bottles, so maybe it's a coincidence and the rest are fine... Geez I hope so :(
 
Okay, now I've read even more, and I think it is the C-Brite again. I just opened a 3rd bottle, hoping it was just a fluke, and same damn thing. Since a) it tasted good prior to bottling, and b) every bottle is the same, I'm thinking it's got to be the sanitizer.

This sucks... :/
 
I had the exact same problem with 2 of my beers. one was because i didnt sanitize the keg well enough but the other one i bottled. After 2 days in the bottle it tasted good and no off flavors but after a week there was a weird taste. After taking it to a friend that knows homebrew he said somewhere in the making of the beer I didn't rinse off the bleach sanatizer off well enough. Unfortunitly that batch is wasted. I have been aging the bottles for 2 1/2 months now and the band aid flavor is just getting worse and worse.
 
Okay, now I've read even more, and I think it is the C-Brite again. I just opened a 3rd bottle, hoping it was just a fluke, and same damn thing. Since a) it tasted good prior to bottling, and b) every bottle is the same, I'm thinking it's got to be the sanitizer.

This sucks... :/

I used C-brite on my first batch. Being new to this and not having much equipment, I did the old "dunk and rinse" for the bottles. I soaked them for a bit, then rinsed out 2-3 times each.

I tasted a bottle yesterday (only 1 week conditioning so far), and I didn't taste anything medicinal. The predominant flavor right now is actually banana (It's a Belgian White).

Anyway, I think if you rinsed each bottle as much as you say you did, it shouldn't be the c-brite. Unless you did something like sanitized the bottling bucket with it and then forgot to rinse *that*. That would explain why it's not just one or two bottles.

EDIT: Or similarly, maybe if you sanitized the siphon hoses and forgot to rinse them? I'm just trying to think of anything that would have come in contact with *all* the beer that might not have been fully rinsed. because as I said, if you rinsed the bottles, I don't see why they'd all have the off-flavor.
 
I just going to come out and say it.

Yes, a bleach-based cleaner ruined all of your beers. I am sorry.. same thing happened to me. Time will not fix it... at least 1 year of waiting hasn't fixed the few bottles I haven't dumped yet.

The reason some people report a problem and some don't, in my opinion, is a matter of degree the bleach (chlorine... as in chloro... chlorophenol) remained and how light bodied the beer is. I didn't notice it in my beer until I did an ultra light ale.. then it came screaming through.

I switched to starsan and never had that happen since.
 
Hmmm, onipar, it sounds like my process with C-Brite was the same as yours, so maybe that''s not it... or maybe I used too high a concentration by mistake or something and needed to do a more thorough rinse.

I don't actually remember rinsing the bottling bucket, but I can't imagine that I didn't. (And that was 2 weeks ago, so it's not surprising I wouldn't remember everything clearly) Actually, I do vaguely remember draining some of the rinse water through the spigot, so I think I must have done that. But that doesn't necessarily mean I did a good enough job... One thing that makes me skeptical about that, though, is that I had to bottle in two batches because my bottling bucket wasn't big enough, and I have tried bottles from both batches and they are both equally affected -- if the bucket weren't sufficiently rinsed (and I did not sanitize in between batches) I would think the first batch would have rinsed it enough.

It could be the siphon hose, or the hose attached to the spigot, I suppose... but in those cases again I sorta think it would have rinsed itself in the process? I dunno... then again, I guess it doesn't take very many ppm of chlorine to ruin a whole batch, huh?

Or it could still be an infection I suppose. I am going to use all different equipment on the next batch just to be safe (the only thing I was going to be using that was the same was the bottling bucket... I think I'm just going to get a new one, can't hurt). Either way, this sucks! :(
 
I just going to come out and say it.

Yes, a bleach-based cleaner ruined all of your beers. I am sorry.. same thing happened to me. Time will not fix it... at least 1 year of waiting hasn't fixed the few bottles I haven't dumped yet.

The reason some people report a problem and some don't, in my opinion, is a matter of degree the bleach (chlorine... as in chloro... chlorophenol) remained and how light bodied the beer is. I didn't notice it in my beer until I did an ultra light ale.. then it came screaming through.

I switched to starsan and never had that happen since.

The thing that sucks the most is that I was already planning on switching to Starsan, and this was just me using up the rest of the C-Brite packets I had on hand. Dammitall..
 
The thing that sucks the most is that I was already planning on switching to Starsan, and this was just me using up the rest of the C-Brite packets I had on hand. Dammitall..

It only took one batch with C-brite before I bought star san. It was such a pain having to rinse all the bottles and everything. I haven't used the star san yet, but I'm pretty sure I'll just toss my remaining c-brite packets.

I forget, did you say what kind of water you used? I'm sure you already covered it...

I wish you better luck on the next batch. But still, I'd let these bottles sit for a while and just test one now and then. You never know, it may get better. :mug:

EDIT: Looking back over the posts, you didn't mention the type of water used. If you used tap water, it's possible there's a lot of chlorine in the water.
 
I did use tap water, and it's possible that's the problem... but I doubt it because a) I know at least two other homebrewers in my city -- and one used to live next door to me! -- who use tap water and have no problems; and b) I used tap water on my first batch as well and it has no Band-Aid or medicinal flavor whatsoever. (I used B-Brite as a "sanitizer" on that batch, because that's what I had been told to do and I hadn't yet found out it wasn't a true sanitizer... I wish I had stuck with that rather than ruin a batch with C-Brite :( )

I've got four beers fermenting right now, so we shall know soon enough if the problem is tap water...

Edit: Oh yeah, and again, the other reason I don't think it was the water is that it tasted great at bottling time. I was actually kinda surprised at how good warm flat ale could taste. heh... Which just makes it all the worse...
 
Oh yeah, and as far as dumping... I have enough bottles for the next beer to come out of the fermenter, and I had been hoping to have a "brews and bottles" party where I had people bring their empties (only they were supposed to be drinking this pale ale, among other things, d'oh...). So worst case scenario is I won't need bottles for at least another 2-3 weeks, and it may be significantly longer than that. Plus that, enough of my friends are big enough drinkers that we may get a lot of this drunk down anyway. Maybe. It's pretty nasty...

Man, this is so crappy.
 
Well, there may be some hope... apparently people have different levels of taste sensitivity to chlorophenol. I find these nigh undrinkable. A couple of other people have said it's pretty bad, but haven't seemed to have hated it as much as I have. My wife -- and here's the lucky part -- apparently is practically immune to chlorophenol, because her complaints with it were all just because it's still a bit under-conditioned. She claimed not to be able to detect the Band-Aid/medicinal taste at all. Maybe she was distracted by the thin mouthfeel, but... knock on wood, maybe she can drink these!
 
As an update, while I think some of the bottles might really have gotten some chlorophenol taste in them, I now believe that what I was tasting was just a real whallop of regular ordinary phenols, from having fermented it a bit hot. The fermentation temp must have gotten out of control at some point. This was before I started fermenting in my basement, so I am not too surprised.

After some more bottle conditioning, it is now much more drinkable -- it will never be good, I am sure, but it is okay now. I definitely understand what people mean by phenols having a spicy/peppery note now. Honestly, it kind of tastes like a not-so-good Belgian, one that's just a bit rough around the edges. Both my wife and I had that impression. Her being a fan of Belgians, she actually kind of likes it, though we both agree it's not great.

So it's not ruined, and I may have been premature in blaming the C-Brite. But it is the beer I am least proud of so far.
 
Hey, glad to hear it's at least drinkable. I've read a ton of threads now of people letting beer sit for weeks and months only to find that the beer finally improved after long conditioning. So yeah, good on you for not dumping it.

As a side note, I finally did my second batch using Star San, and wow, it's soooo much easier. Not only that, but the large bottle will probably last me years. I bought a gallon of distilled water, and used 6 ml of Star San to dilute in the gallon. I only used a fraction of the gallon on brew day.

Definitely a good investment (I forget if you said you already bought some...I think you did).

Anyway, good luck with further conditioning! :mug:
 
So yeah, good on you for not dumping it.

Yeah, I'm always blown away by people who dump beer without at least trying to have a party and see if they can get rid of it that way. I figure, if it will give you a buzz and won't make you sick, somebody will drink it! :tank:

Definitely a good investment (I forget if you said you already bought some...I think you did).

Oh, no doubt. That's part of what was so frustrating when I thought it was the C-Brite, is that I already had the Starsan on my shopping list and was just using up the rest of the C-Brite packets. Yeah, Starsan is pretty much the best thing ever. Ever, I tell you! :mug:
 
Oh, no doubt. That's part of what was so frustrating when I thought it was the C-Brite, is that I already had the Starsan on my shopping list and was just using up the rest of the C-Brite packets. Yeah, Starsan is pretty much the best thing ever. Ever, I tell you! :mug:

You said it! I was immediately converted after using it only once. Stuck some in a spray bottle and had at it. :ban:
 
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