Question about meaty/hot dog flavor

Last night I bottled a one gallon batch of a mild ale with brett. It had been aging on brett for about 7 months after which I racked it on to 2 lbs of mulberries (this was late May). I remember last checking on it about a month ago and it had a meaty/hot dog flavor and was almost unpalatable. I looked this up online and figured this was most likely autolysis.

I decided to bottle it anyways figuring it might age out. Then I took a taste of it having racked it off the yeast and the fruit and it tastes normal. Not as sour as I wanted, but that's neither here nor there. Obviously since it's fine now I have nothing to worry about, but I'd like to know for sure what happened to this batch so I can carry that knowledge with me with future batches. Was it autolysis and racking it off the yeast "fixed" it? Or was this an example of a "sick" sour ale? Your input is welcome.

You won't get sourness out of just brett. Just funk. To get sourness you need to add souring bacteria.

I'm not sure what caused it to taste meaty but autolysis would not be fixed by racking off. Sickness is a texture issue, so it's not that, either. When you say you racked, did you cold crash before racking? Did you taste it just after racking or after bottling?

Did your beer have coriander in the recipe?

My wife always picked out a "hot-doggy" note in Celis White (RIP). Turns out, it was the type of coriander MBC was using.

ReverseApacheMaster said:

You won't get sourness out of just brett. Just funk. To get sourness you need to add souring bacteria.

I'm not sure what caused it to taste meaty but autolysis would not be fixed by racking off. Sickness is a texture issue, so it's not that, either. When you say you racked, did you cold crash before racking? Did you taste it just after racking or after bottling?

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Sorry, I meant funk. Sometimes I conflate the two terms, even though they're not the same thing. To answer your questions, i didn't cold crash it. I just took a taste from the 2-3 ounces that were left in the bottling bucket. For my initial taste a month back, I just withdrew some with a glass turkey baster while it was still bulk aging.

Brett tends to clean up many different flavors and produce its own. In the first year my Flanders got sick and slimy then tasted meaty and smokey then cleaned itself up later, well to be horsey and leathery if you call that cleaned up.

Hmm... I got a meaty taste in two gruits I made. One was definitely infected and is still aging beneath a nice pellicle. The meaty zaste and smell has given way to fruity notes. The other one was definitely (well, reasonably certainly) not infected (I fermented it with a wine yeast tho, just for giggles), but got the same meaty smell. No one could really tell me what caused that weird taste so I figured it was some herb or other. Now I'm not so sure....