Weird flavors/smells after carbonation

So, I recently brewed an IPA recipe that I got through my LHBS. Just before bottling, I sampled a taste and it was great!

However, a couple/few weeks later, I've now tested 2 bottles, about a week apart each, and have noticed some major changes in the flavor of the beer since I bottled it. 1) it has an almost burnt rubber smell to it. It's hard to describe but the aroma of the beer has definitely changed. 2) there are some funky flavors in here that I'm also having a really hard time describing.

At first I was really just hoping that a little more time would smooth out the beer and that maybe there was some by-products of carbonation that would settle out of the beer after a little more conditioning, but from what I can remember, it doesn't seem to have made much improvement after another week of conditioning. I'm gonna be really bummed if this batch went bad somewhere along the way during carbonation, but I'm open to any input or suggestions that anyone has.

Useful information:
-dry hopped with pellet hops for about 10 days after roughly 14 days of fermentation. Did NOT use a hop bag or cheese cloth to hold the hops, just dumped them in and let them sit.

-accidentally stirred up some of the trub while siphoning into my bottling bucket with then was mixed in pretty will with the beer when adding in my priming sugar

-bottles sat at a fairly stable 74-ish degrees F for 10 or so days before cracking open the first bottle of beer.

My plan is to continue to wait it out in hopes that my brew evens out a bit and some of these strange off flavors disappear, but if anyone has any thoughts to the contrary I'd certainly appreciate them.

(I wonder if maybe the beer somehow got over oxygenated during bottling?)

This might help. http://www.howtobrew.com/section4/chapter21-2.html

The only ones that even KIND of meet what I'm experiencing are the "medicinal" and "solvent-like" descriptions, but the causes don't seem to be problems that I would expect to have gone wrong. I'm bummin kind of hard on this one cause I really put a lot of effort into it and it would suck to have lost a great brew right at the finish like :-(

Sorry, this is the link...autolysis is burnt rubber tasting. http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter10-3.html

How old was the yeast that you used and did you pitch enough of it? Starter?

cactussam said:

-accidentally stirred up some of the trub while siphoning into my bottling bucket with then was mixed in pretty will with the beer when adding in my priming sugar

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Same happened to me with my last batch. My problem was I dryhopped with whole hops and they got stuck in my siphon, and the little plastic flap inside broke off. My beer got all messed up, tons of trub got into my keg, and I ended up losing about a gal.

Cold crashing didn't help much but I have a really bad off taste also now which is hard to describe. It was not there before this incident.

Note to self: buy a back up auto-siphon.

1Mainebrew said:

Sorry, this is the link...autolysis is burnt rubber tasting. http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter10-3.html

How old was the yeast that you used and did you pitch enough of it? Starter?

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The yeast was a brand new pack of Wyeast and I'm pretty sure I pitched enough of it. It was a liquid pack that had the bubble inside that you had to break, and I let it sit for several hours to get going, so I don't think that "starting" it was the issue.

I think that my major problem was at the end when I was trying to get all of the liquid out of my primary that I could while still trying to filter out the pellet hops.

Lesson learned: dry hop in some sort of a bag and don't pour beer out of the primary into the bottling bucket, that's what siphons are for. I just KNOW that's where my problem came from. I may retry the IPA again in the future, but I'm thinking that something more fall/wintery is in order for now.

Water?

Many municipalities inject chlorine and/or chloramines to keep germs at bay and provide us citizens with clean, pest-free drinking water.

However, chlorine and chloramines contribute a mediciny/clove/bandaid flavor to beers.
Spring water, distilled water with minerals added back in, or a campden tablet should help that beer next batch, if indeed, chlorine is your culprit.

Did you pour the beer from the primary into the bottling bucket? That could have introduced oxygen. Also after you bottled it was it in direct light? (sun or even fluorescent lights) This can affect the taste also from what have heard. I am a noob but those were just two thoughts that crossed my mind.

Has anyone had autolysis flavors from getting too much yeast in the bottle?

Jayman931 said:

Did you pour the beer from the primary into the bottling bucket? That could have introduced oxygen. Also after you bottled it was it in direct light? (sun or even fluorescent lights) This can affect the taste also from what have heard. I am a noob but those were just two thoughts that crossed my mind.

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Not entirely, just the last few cups of beer. The rest I siphoned out. I only poured that bit in because of all the hops clogging up my siphon at the end.

Autolysis seems to be the greatest potential culprit here, as I've used my tap water for every beer I've made so far and never run into this problem before.

Also, no direct sunlight at any point during brewing, and the weird taste came after bottling. Everything tasted great before carbonation.

Two bits of advice:
1. Decrease the amount of trub that is carried over into the bottles. Cold crash if necessary, and stop siphoning before you get down to the trub.
2. Introduce as little O2 as possible during bottling. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, but do whatever you can. Oxidation is probably the #1 most common problem for homebrewers.

unionrdr said:

You could've gotten some of those off flavors in primary. Bottling at 2 weeks may not have given the yeast time to clean up & settle out more before bottling. Then when it carbs in the bottle,the carbonation brings those off flavors out more where you can smell/taste them.

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Yeah, whole time spent in primary, overall, was between 8 and 9 weeks, so I don't think that was the issue. I'll just have to be more careful with trub getting into my bottling bucket in the future as well as a slightly better set up for siphoning. Oxygen may or may not have been a contributing factor, but I could be more diligent in minimizing contact with the air.

i've been having this same issue.. beer tastes awesome .. until bottling... did anyone ever find out why this happened?