Ethyl acetate odor in saison

Hi all,
Brewed a second runnings saison from a sour tripel I brewed. Pitched dupont yeast, and three or four days later it tasted fine.

The bucket I fermented in, which I reserve for saisons, has a resident lacto population. Made a saison earlier this year, same bucket, same lacto, real good beer.

Went to bottle it last night, three weeks later and the solvent smell was terrible. I know this isn't a ferment temp issue, because it was fine when it was finished, and the flavor developed. I think it was more of a result of an acetobacter infeciton.

Anyways, does this go away at all? Kind of looking forward to this beer, and I'd hate to have to dump (would be the first time)
Thanks! Adam

How do you guarantee that your bucket keeps a resident lacto culture? Any thing that would kill brett or other microbes would kill lacto pretty easy. I don't think you have an acetobacter problem but more likely a wild yeast strain. Your saison yeast would take over first and the wild strain would wait till it was finished, this could explain why it smelled fine and three weeks later it did not. If the temps where not the issue this is the only problem I could see.

Thanks for your response, thing is, there was very little in gravity change, maybe 2 points during those three weeks. had a pellicle and all...wonder if this will age out.

I would think not. I would personally throw some brett in there and see if you could knock it down that way. I would not dump it without waiting a few months either way.

Brett does not need sugar to produce flavors like Sacc strains. It will continue to metabolize compounds until an equilibrium is formed for that particular strain. This is why you can add Brett at bottling and see a huge change in flavor development with no change in carbonation levels (think Orval).

Ethyl acetate is formed from acetic acid and ethanol. Both plentiful in beer.

It is likely you do have Brett in your culture. If it was acetobacter there would be a strong acetic acid flavor - is there? And with enough oxygen this can happen quite quickly.

You can wait and hope that the Brett will metabolize the ethyl acetate back into acetic acid and alcohol. Or you can blend in another beer to reduce the amount of ethyl acetate below flavor thresholds.

No acetic flavor at all. I hope it's brett, I bottled half and kegged the other half. FG was 1.002, so I'm not too worried about over carbonation.

I noticed a berliner weisse I brewed awhile back have this type of character for about three days, it quickly disappeared. I'll update this post when I get into the bottles, which I'll be letting sit for awhile. Seems that there is little out there regarding ethyl acetate.

Acetone smell and flavor seem to be calming down, revealing more of an aspirin taste (brett c.?). This is the kegged version, bottles I don't plan on touching for a while

Smell and flavor continue to mellow. Safe to say though, that it will never be gone...on the bright side, the mouthfeel is much thicker than 1.002 suggests. I'll update in a few months