Different Tastes, Different bottles...same beer

I have been going through my Bavarian Hefe lately...pretty quickly and have noticed that some of the bottles taste a little more bitter..or maybe it's skunky I don't know. It's not to the point that its undrinkable but just slightly off enough for my wife to notice. She likes some but not others. Does anyone know why this might happen? All of the bottle were sanitized the same way...they're brown and have been kept in what is now turning into my kegerator. It was unplugged in my basement so the temp stayed around the low 70's.

Yeasties tend to reduce the bitterness in a beer and give a more rounded flavor. Since the beer is cloudy, it may be difficult to judge the difference between a little yeast and a lot of yeast... so maybe the taste difference is all in the pour... how much yeast is left in the bottle...

I know that it's typically ok to drink hefe's with the yeast even though Palmer's "How to Brew" says that yeast can cause gas and diarrhea.

Are you saying that the more yeast in the glass the less bitter it will taste? Usually I try not to poor it into the glass because SWMBO thinks it looks gross. I could care less about the yeast however.

Yes. That is what I'm saying. The germans call it "mit hefe" ("with yeast") when you swirl the last bit of the beer around the bottle to suspend the yeast before pouring it into a glass. This is very style-accurate for a hefeweizen.

Here's a fun experiment- Take a bottle of bottle conditioned beer. Pour 2/3rds of it into a glass slowly and carefully. Then with the remaining third, swirl it around the bottle and pour it into a separate glass. Compare the appearance. Compare the tastes. They will be noticeably different. As a matter of fact I made an ESB with orange peel and it is decidedly better when poured mit hefe. It really brings out the flavors more and kind of brings them together...

Alright....I guess I'll 'have' to drink a beer tonight to test this out....woah is me...

Nah, don't do that...OK, you can if you want.

I also pour my HWs by positioning the glass to horizontal with the floor, insert the bottle into the glass and pour it in while re-positioning the glass to the verticle (upright position) and as the liquid reaches the bottle rim slowly pull it out. The agitation in the bottle will cause the yeast to stir and mix with the beer while pouring.

When all the beer is gone then let the foam drop into the glass.