off flavor - medicinal/band-aid - i know chlorine BUT help me solve the puzzle

So this is the 4th time I've had this band-aid, medicinal flavor in one of my beers. First two times were long ago, in a brown ale and a pale ale. I originally attributed them to an infection as I don't think it's chlorine, which seems to be the popular culprit for this flavor. I use chlorinated water but never use bleach. None of my hundred or so other batches ever had the off flavor including lighter beers and lagers.

Now I've moved to a 1 bbl semi-pro system and 2 of my first 4 batches of beer have the same friggin' band-aid off flavor. My stout and brown ale were fine but BOTH batches of APA had the off-flavor. Same yeast, similar ingredients (with overlap) so it's not ingredient-based. I don't think it's a sanitation issue any more as I was super anal with the last apa as the first one went south. I also don't suspect it is yeast as I repitched the brown ale yeast to the second apa.

After painstaking detective work via my notes, the only thing I can come up with is dish soap.

For both batches of apa, and neither of the brown or the stout, i used a spray bottle to mist the boil to prevent a boil over. In my detective process I smelled/tasted the spray bottle water and it smelled a little soapy. Not much taste, but still a bit. I remember using this same bottle once to detect leaks in my kegging system and put a bit of dish soap in it. I guess I assumed it was gone by now. The soap contained something called triclosan"

"This organic compound is a white powdered solid with a slight aromatic/phenolic odor. It is a chlorinated aromatic compound which has functional groups representative of both ethers and phenols. Phenols often show anti-bacterial properties. Triclosan is only slightly soluble in water, but soluble in ethanol, diethyl ether, and stronger basic solutions such as 1 M sodium hydroxide. Triclosan can be synthesized from 2,4-dichlorophenol." -wikipedia

which looks like it could induce some of the same reactions as chlorine. Now, it was a crazy trace amount but could this be it? Anyone have any experience with this stuff or know about organic chemistry?

more research on my part leads me back to the obvious: chlorine. My local water has between 0.4 and 2.7 ppm chlorine and it is likely that concentrations are higher this time of year (low water, high temps, more bacteria = more chlorine). I recently moved locations so proximity to source could be an issue and thus concentrations higher (nearer to treatment plant). From what I've read, chlorine can react with organic compounds to produce chlorophenols. I'm guessing chlorinated hot liqour contacts grains in the mash at dough-in and begins this process with my apa. Possibly, the lack of buffering capacity of my all light grain apa (pale, malt, munich) relative to the brown and stout (dark crystals, chocolate, rb) provide a better environment for the reaction of chlorine with organic compounds and produce this off-flavor in my apas.

Anyone have any comments on this potential explanation?

Are there threaded connections on the cold side of the system?, and how do you oxygenate the wort when pitching. Did you check on the other components in the dishwashing soap, I belive most use sodium lauryl sulfate as the detergent component with various metasilicates as wetting agents. The bandaid taste and smell sounds like a slow start infection though, sometimes material can slough off and leave an infected surface exposed to give you grief later, like in ball valves between seats and body.

yeah, my first thoughts were infection and cold side there is therminator and hoses that I 'try' and thoroughly clean but could be. However, i have had several successful brews in between and since these. SLS isn't even an ingredient in the soap I used but there are a ton of other big chemicals in there. Fermentations all started about 24-30 hours with 30 min aeration using pump and SS air stone.

How are you filtering/treating your brewing liquor?

I wonder if the culprit is chloramine and not chlorine.

according to our water source they do not use chloramine so I am not considering that. Although, I am going to call them today and make sure they didn't start using it this week or something.

I am not treating the water only b/c I haven't yet. Our water source reports 0.4-2.7 (mean 1.7) ppm chlorine and we're a good 10 miles from the treatment facility so I have been 'assuming' chlorine levels are low but maybe that's wrong.

Only thing that is a possibility is the wort PH of the darker styles may have been lower than the pale styles and that helped slow a bacterial problem. I have had the same type of problem that was traced back to infected material trapped in swagelok fitting on CFC. How are you sanitizing the therminator chiller?, chemical or heat.

i backflush the therminator with hot water, both ways, about 5 times immediately after chilling. THen I soak it in pbw and then let it dry. I sanitize the whole line with star san just before chilling.

called the water folks and found out something interesting that may or may not be true. Guy says they don't add chloramine but that it can form in the pipes through a reaction between the cholorine they do add and the nitrification process and the evolution of ammonia. Wouldn't doubt it.

Guys on probrewer site suggest, too, that the darker beers may be covering up the chlorophenol in those beers which makes sense although I cannot and have not detected it on my pallate.

Campden tablets would be an easy cheap fix for chloramines.

i'm on it ollllo. saturdays brew will have in-line carbon filtration and camden. Overkill better than nothing.

Talk to me about your yeast health.

It sounds like sanitation is not the issue. I had one batch turn phenolic on me and it was due to very poor fermentation. The yeast got stressed and the crapped that flavor in my beer like it was their job.

stout and first apa were both fresh wl pitches. 15 vials for 1 bbl batch aerated for 30 minutes with air pump, hepa filter, and sanitized ss air stone. All vials from one source but two dates, october I think, expiration.

Pitched around 65 and fermented at a constant 67. Of course, it's only been about 14 days for the bad batches but I don't think this is going to clean up.

Also added yeast nutes the last 15 minutes of the boil.

Reverend JC said:

Talk to me about your yeast health.

It sounds like sanitation is not the issue. I had one batch turn phenolic on me and it was due to very poor fermentation. The yeast got stressed and the crapped that flavor in my beer like it was their job.

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I wonder if that was the problem with my first batch. It was an SNPA clone. I used WLP0001 with no starter, and took almost 3 days to get going. It developed a terrible band-aid taste and I had to pitch it.

I did have a spray bottle of bleach solution in use that day, but frankly I can't remember if or where or how I might have used it and failed to rinse.

I originally suspected the bleach, but now I'm thinking infection was the problem.

Yeah, I'm still on the friggin' fence about this one. Either it's an infection due to something being nasty that I missed or it's a chlorine reaction in the mash. Next brew is carbon filtered liquor and campden tablet in the liquor.

too strong iodophor mixture will give you a bandaid taste.

no iodophor or other iodine products in my brewery

so i checked the first apa today - it's been fermenting 17 days at 66F. The band aid smell is barely detectable and it has no noticable off flavors?! The beer just finished about 5 days ago at my target fg of 1.013 (been 1.013 for 5 days in a row). I know the yeast could have scrubbed (and probably did) the molecules out but which hypothesis (or a third?) does this support - a wild yeast/infection or chlorine? I'm happy, of course, but I'd like to know. Either way I'll be using water filter and camden next time to see if anything happens early on in fermentation again and I certainly wouldn't want to sell beer that went through this odd phase. Can anyone offer any explanations or theories?

nope, taste is still there.

It sounds like the therminator is the most likely source of your grief, you could soak inside with 5% sodium hydroxide solution followed with a dilute distilled vinegar rinse to remove caustic film. My guess is there is something trapped in the plate join area that breaks loose and contaminates the slow starting batches. Best sanitation method for the therminator is baking unit in oven to kill all trapped beasties, not rely on quick rinse with liquid sanitizer solution to get job done.

thanks, kladue. Did just what you said yesterday and I did keep getting hop bits in successive purges. I went through 3 heat/purge cycles before it was 'clean'. However, did not see any trub that I could tell, nearly all hop pellet bits. I now use a screen to prefilter this stuff so hopefully that will help. I'm brewing today with dechlorinated water and a good healthy yeast pitch so we'll see.

Yea, I always bake mine at 400 for an hour. I also toss it in the self-clean when ever we do that as well.

So i've over-anal-ized my sanitation procedures and started more intense therminator purging, packing it in pbw, and baking it between brews. I still get the band-aidy/medicinally/maybe even green appley/don't even know what the flavor is off-flavor. Sometimes it's so bad I have to toss the batch, sometimes it''s mild and goes away, sometimes it isn't there and beers are fine. It is very bad, on average, about 1/4 of the time.

I have some fruit flies in the brewery but not in any of the fermenters. From what I've read these typically bring aceto-bacter and beers aren't sour.

Beers taste great going to the fermenters, I'm pretty sure the flavor develops once the beer hits the fermenters.

Fermenters are plastic conicals cleaned with pbw hot rinse and sanitized with star san, purged with co2.

chilling lines (march pump and therminator) are pbw'ed and star san'd. I tried boil\recirc but the therminator was getting clogged and slowing things down too much.

The brewery is very small (250 sq ft) and is very dusty and there is a continual 'rain' of particles from the ceiling. Also, water seeps in through the soil into one corner of the brewery, flows across the floor, and out the other corner (i know, it's crazy).

During brewing, door is open and air is pulled out window with box fan.

Only time fermenter is opened (besides cleaning) is to insert oxygenation stone through 1" top port and I use sanitized foil to seal. During this time I minimize air currents as much as possible (close door/window, cut off ac)

When beers have very strong off-flavor, I have waited 2-3 weeks and it does not go away. Sometimes, beer will have yeasty notes (green) associated with the flavor, and it will go away once yeast has dropped. In other words, it tastes like the flavor is 'in' the yeast and that sometimes the yeast 'cleans it up'.

Sometimes, repitching yeast from bad batch results in good beer.

Any ideas? My current theory (changes every day) is the air in the brewery is too 'dusty' and sometimes even a small exposure results in this infection (whatever it is).

I checked my records. 50 some batches in my home/garage (several locations) and 2 similar infections - usually associated with starters getting kitchen sink water near/in them. 30 brews at new location, around 10 severe to mild infections and nearly as many tossed batches.

I've removed all chlorine and I'm sure it isn't associated with mash chemistry (e.g., phenols).

Any help/ideas/experiences/shots in the dark appreciated.

Chris

Are you treating the water you use to make your starsan? I mix mine with RO water. The few times I mix it up fresh the water gets a dose of camden to remove chlorine before adding the starsan.

Check all of your threaded fittings post boil. Hoses and pipes used in transfers should be cleaned well too and dried between uses.

It sounds like you are going in circles now. It's time to start eliminating stuff. The easiest thing and cheapest thing to do is to start with a 5 gallon batch. Ditch the plastic fermenter for this batch and use a new bucket and new yeast. I suggest a dry yeast, something new from your LHBS, not something you have laying around. While you are there, invest $12 and get a new bucket. This will eliminate two strong contenders right off the bat. Use your water filter or get a couple of carboys of bottled water. Try not to brew in that dusty, mold ridden place you nornally brew in and see how the batch turns out. This will either implicate or eliminate yeast, your fermenter, where you brew and the water. You can then move on to the next thing if you don't get the taste, or narrow it down to one of the first four culprits it you get the same taste.

I had a big problem with a string of infected beers late last year. I believe I isolated it to cold side bubbling that was occurring racking from the boiler to the fermenter.

I had installed (poorly) a bazooka screen and stainless 1/4 turn drain valve on my boil kettle. Every time I drained the cooled wort from the boiler i would get tons of bubbling in the hose coming off the drain valve due to a poor seal of the valve against the kettle. After installing the valve all my beers were coming out infected. I tried eliminating everything from my process, chiller, water, yeast starters etc... But what I eventually did is toss my old aluminum boil pot that I had installed the valve in and bought a new stainless pot. I went back to using the good'ol autosiphon to rack from the pot with no bubbling/aeration and have since made a couple successful great brews with no infection.

I believe that the bubbling in the valve and racking line was sucking air from the surrounding environment into the freshly cooled wort. I brew in a dusty garage so any nasties floating around in the air could have been sucked right into the transfer tube along with the wort.

I'd ensure you have absolutely no bubbling/aeration going on in cold-side valves and hoses.

Did you ever determine what was causing your problem?

Reverend JC said:

Talk to me about your yeast health.
It sounds like sanitation is not the issue. I had one batch turn phenolic on me and it was due to very poor fermentation. The yeast got stressed and the crapped that flavor in my beer like it was their job.

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So, the bandaid phenolics can can come from really poor fermentation? Ive got a 10 gal batch of Cali Common; one carboy tastes fine (1.052->1.031) and the other is has oak cubes that I boiled and put in a sanitized nylon bag, but had to handle it a bunch trying to fit it in the carboy. the oaked one is @ 1.041 was a little slower at starting. It has a terrible bandaid flavor (Ive had it before and am super close to dumping because Ive had that happen before and there is no recovery.. and well, Im not going to drink it or serve it)

They were started with washed yeast that I did not proof, and as a result took several days to get activity (like 4 days )... my suspicion is wild yeast, but your note about really poor fermentation is intriguing. Ferm temp (60°F) is not a problem as it is in a converted upright freezer with temp control and the probe is taped (and insulated) to the carboy.

So, can anyone else confirm that crappy fermentation causes bandaid phenolics?

Mandoman,
Any final thoughts on this. I have had 2 batches in a row with the medicinal taste. My process has been consistent over the last few years with no problem.

Just curious if you think you narrowed it down.

Hi all, I have made about ten beers over the last 1.5 years, and three of them have come out off. The first, a stout, had a horrible plasticy/phenol aroma. It was with US-05 and bottled water. It also finished quite high. I then did a saison with Wyeast 3711, the best beer ive ever made! Then I did my own recipe IPA with Wyeast 1056. I used bottled water again, and once again this flavor came back; it was not as bad as the stout but definitely not a good taste.

At this point, I overhauled everything.

When I say bottled water i mean this machine that dispenses water outside my supermarket. I reasoned that it could be doing a poor or irregular cleaning job, so I got a carbon filter for my tap. Chlorine is now eliminated. I also got yeast nutrient to make sure they are all well fed. I bought a few more things to help my brew day go more smoothly. I eliminated most of the plastic gear (new bucket, new hoses and siphons), but kept my 5 gal better bottle. I decided to do a better cooling job this time, keeping the beer in the mid 60s with ice and water in a rubbermaid.

I rebrewed my IPA with a few recipe tweaks for flavor and got a pack of US-05 this time. I did not rehydrate the yeast. The beer went into my 5 gal carboy for 10 days, then into a 6 gal with hops. It smelled and tasted great in the bottling bucket, but a week later when I was itching for bottles, plastic taste is back!

It all seems very inconsistent. Where are the glaring problems:

1) It's "only" happened with US-05 and/or Wyeast 1056 (let's just call them different yeasts for now). I use nutrients BUT I don't aerate all that well. Shaking is all I have ever done. No beer I have bottled with US-05 has tasted that good, except for a barleywine that is still aging. Samples from that are great, but my problem usually only shows up in the bottle or the bottling bucket.

2) I do pitch my yeast kind of high. Ever since I couldn't use my sink to cool my beer to 70, I have been pitching 85-90F. This is a glaring fault in my process which I have stopped doing. I just wait for it to cool more with the lid on.

3) It could be my better bottle has just given up on me and is fraught with infection. I am considering giving up on this experiment and just getting rid of the 5 gal BB. I have a 6 gal I just bought, and i can easily by another 5.

All three points are good arguments and make me think my process is just flawed. Here's the kicker: a friend brews as well a few floors up. It so happened we made IPAs at the same time and we both used Chico (I used US-05, he used 1056). Guess what flavor I'm detecting in both beers? This plastic funk! We couldn't have more different processes: I am extract, he's all grain, Im better bottle, he is all glass. Knowing that, I cannot believe its just some infection; this appears directly correlated to the Chico strain.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Just a recap on the medicinal causes:
Chlorine or Chloramine in the water
Poor yeast health
High fermentation temps
Water from a bad garden hose
Any others you guys can think of?

I don't believe infection causes the medicinal taste. Correct me on that if I am wrong. The pitching temp is really high, and if the yeast is healthy, it will take off quickly. Therefore it may take a while for the temperature to settle down inside the fermenter.

I always considered the high fermentation temperatures to have a very strong phenolic taste as opposed to medicinal but they are both somewhat similar and could be confused easily.

When you mention that the taste shows up in the bottle, I tend to worry about oxidation. If you don't have your bottling process down to a science, an oxidized taste will develop after a couple of weeks that causes a frustrating off flavor that could be confused with medicinal taste.

gregblatz said:

Just a recap on the medicinal causes:
Chlorine or Chloramine in the water
Poor yeast health
High fermentation temps
Water from a bad garden hose
Any others you guys can think of?

I don't believe infection causes the medicinal taste. Correct me on that if I am wrong. The pitching temp is really high, and if the yeast is healthy, it will take off quickly. Therefore it may take a while for the temperature to settle down inside the fermenter.

I always considered the high fermentation temperatures to have a very strong phenolic taste as opposed to medicinal but they are both somewhat similar and could be confused easily.

When you mention that the taste shows up in the bottle, I tend to worry about oxidation. If you don't have your bottling process down to a science, an oxidized taste will develop after a couple of weeks that causes a frustrating off flavor that could be confused with medicinal taste.

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Here is what the experts say:

Medicinal
Tastes/Smells Like: Cough syrup, mouthwash, Band-Aid™, smoke, clove-like (spicy)

Possible Causes: A variety of different phenols are almost always the cause for medicinal flavors in beer. Phenols can cause solvent, astringent, plastic and medicinal flavors. Medicinal-tasting phenols are usually brought out during mashing and/or sparging and are caused by incorrect pH levels, water amounts and temperatures. Using chlorine or iodine-based sanitizers improperly can bring out Chlorophenols. Yeast also produces phenols, and a clove-like characteristic is deliberate in some ale, especially Hefeweizen and other wheat beers.

How to Avoid: Follow proper mashing and sparging techniques and always follow the specific directions for different sanitizers. Taking the same precautions to avoid Chlorophenols and astringency should help to wipe out the chances of medicinal flavors. Always use the proper yeast for the style of beer being brewed.

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I am very interested in this thread b/c I had the EXACT SAME ISSUE over a period of a few brews. The pale ale came out of the primary tasting great. I dry -hopped then bam - bandaids. I had a different pale ale that came out bandaid tasting so I let it sit for a few weeks. I decided to dump it, but as I was slowly dumping, I placed a glass under it for giggles. Tasted fine. I stopped, re-sealed it and drank it for about a week before the taste returned.
In the end I have narrowed it down to one of three things:
1. infected hops. All of those brews came from the same 1 lb bag of cascade
2. too highly concentrated Oxy without good rinsing prior to sanitization
3. too highly concentrated Iodophor.

Things are back to normal, but it really had me baffled for a while.

kcinpdx: That's similar to my issues. My first few brews my only santizer was OneStep. They never had any issues smell or taste wise, but we also bland IMO. Once I read around and people mostly use StarSan and Iodophor, i started using those. Maybe its something about how much I use, but it could definitely be related to that. From now on ill use OneStep at bottling time.

mandoman said:

i backflush the therminator with hot water, both ways, about 5 times immediately after chilling. THen I soak it in pbw and then let it dry. I sanitize the whole line with star san just before chilling.

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Sounds like an airborne brettanomyces yeast infection. It requires a serious deep cleaning (I prefer caustic soda/ citric acid or others here may recommend bleach) EVERYWHERE -- equipment, surfaces, remove wood or other refuges etc. Once your brewing area is infected it is difficult to remove ask any winemaker.

I had similar experiences as mandoman's on my last two paler beers. The first was an Imperial Hefeweizen, and it was more clove-like than band-aid, but I definitly got some band-aid flavors. The second is an Imperial IPA that's in primary, and the gravity test sample had a noticeable band-aid flavor.

This thread has been really helpful to give me some ideas of where to start. For me, I'll start with cold side sanitization of my ball valve and hoses (hoses are all getting replaced) as well as getting more anal about sanitizer concentrations.

Thank you to all past posters on this thread. Great info.

After tossing a few infected batches immediately I kept several 1 litre flip tops back for kicks. After 5 months I popped one, and it was surprisingly drinkable with this annoying flavour far in the background. Trying the next one it was not at all consumable. It is quite interesting to see this massive variation between bottles when their treatment and contents were seemingly consistent. Still puzzled but have a couple theories, (a) the infection was stratified to some degree and somehow made a difference when filling, (b) the varying ullage somehow was a determining factor.

Should have kept more.

Varying levels of rinsing in your bottles when using chlorine as a sanitizer?

M_C

trubled said:

After tossing a few infected batches immediately I kept several 1 litre flip tops back for kicks. After 5 months I popped one, and it was surprisingly drinkable with this annoying flavour far in the background. Trying the next one it was not at all consumable. It is quite interesting to see this massive variation between bottles when their treatment and contents were seemingly consistent. Still puzzled but have a couple theories, (a) the infection was stratified to some degree and somehow made a difference when filling, (b) the varying ullage somehow was a determining factor.

Should have kept more.

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This has been a problem for me in my last few beers. A couple things I have been thinking about:

1. Chlorine, not just in the water you use to Mash/Boil your wort with, but the water that is mixed with Starsan for sanitizing the Primary/Secondary fermenter, and the bottles. I am getting my water checked by the water company free today, so more to follow on that.

2. Bottling, my friend has brewed a lot at my house and the big difference has been that he Kegs and I bottle. I use the caps that are supposed to consume the oxygen, but maybe that takes a while? Can the oxygen in the top of your bottle create an off flavor for a while until consumed by the chemicals in the cap? (The reason I ask this is that I have had a couple of beers before that have a gross Band Aid flavor for the first few months and after about 5 months of being bottled, they have made a turn for the better in Flavor. The beers that have done this were (Scotch Silly Clone, Newcastle Clone). This flavor has also happened when I have both sterilized my bottles in the dishwasher without soap and when I have used Starsan with my tap water. (I say this because I was banking that possible soap leftovers from regular dish-washing had been causing the band aids... but no.)

3. Fermentation Temperature: my beers haven't seemed to have a problem with fermenting because they have been pretty active (especially a Corsendonk Belgium Brown Ale that I just cloned which was the most violent fermentation process I have personally seen but still has the Band Aids after bottling) but in general, I am fermenting at usually 68-72 degrees, is this enough change to cause the off flavors?

I am open to suggestions, I am looking forward to seeing what news the Water people bring me.

UPDATE

Just to fill yall in on a little test I just bottled my most recent beer today that was originally made with my regular chlorinated tap water. Well anyways, I know that it is very possible that the chlorinated water originally used to make my brew could be the problem, but I ran a little test today to see if the changes I made during bottling might have solved the band aid problem.

Today while bottling I used ALL distilled store bought water. Everything from sanitizing my bottles, equipment and caps to the actual water that the sugar was boiled in was using distilled store bought water. Here's my hypothesis that I am checking. I want to see if it is not so much the Chlorination of the water originally used that matters but the chlorination of the water that is used and put in the bottles with the sugar etc at bottling day. One of my reasons for thinking this is that usually my beer on bottling day tastes pretty fantastic but after a couple weeks in the bottle, I get band aids. Also, I would think that some/most of the original chlorine in the water would get boiled out. Anyways, since I just used clean water for the bottling portion I am excited to see if that is the potential fix for this frustrating problem. I will post again on this in a couple weeks.

A worthwhile test would be to buy a new bottling bucket, spigot, wand, and hose. Bottle your next beer with this new gear. I had a similar problem and this worked.