Infection? * Pic *

So, the first 3 bottles of my American Brown ale were fantastic. I opened up one tonight after dinner, and it really didn't taste right to me. Thing is, I burnt my mouth at dinner so I wasn't really sure if that's what it was or not. I opened up a Smithwick's To see how that tasted to me and that tasted funny too but I'm not sure if it's because I burnt my mouth or because I'm just paranoid or have the taste in my mouth from the first beer. Anyway, After a while I let my American brown settle in the glass and then I went back and looked at it and this is what I saw... I can't tell if this is an infection or if it's just the way the head settled out - It's strange because the first three bottles of this I opened up were great, but I open two in a row now and both seem to taste the same.

Unless that has been sitting in the glass for a few days it is not infection.

That's CO2 bubbles coming out of suspension from the bottom of your glass. What you are tasting are probably phenols from uncontrolled fermentation temps or stressed yeast. Or the yeast you used is supposed to produce a few phenols. Welcome to the addiction...scrutinizing your own beer is the first step in making better beer.

As the others said, definitely an artifact from beer bubbles rising. If they were little mold clumps they wouldn't look like that after being poured from a bottle. There's a million other great culprits for the weird flavor, though!

Lol. Thanks I'm not new by any means.

Ferm temps were perfect. Literally perfect. The yeast was 1056. The taste is not phenolic at all. It might very well be my damn mouth from dinner.

I just thought it would be weird for some bottles to be infected and not others. Maybe 1 infected, or all, but some yes and some no seemed weird.

Thanks for the input guys. I'll have try another one when i can confirm my taste is straightened out.

I'm curious to see what you find out.

It doesn't seem to weird to me to have a few infected and not others, though... during bottling we're shoving that wand into each bottle, introducing it to a cap, and leaving it a bit open to air at various points. If your taste recovers and it's still funky, you might check out your bottle sanitizing process. I had some friends collecting bottles for me (and of COURSE God forbid they rinse them), and even after I tried to clean them out some of those bottles still went bad.

Interesting thought. Actually, the 2nd case I have yet to open is all brand new bottles I bought the day of. Interesting to see what those are like.

False alarm. Just got back from my LH BS, both guys there confirmed there's nothing wrong with it at all. I guess it's just from burning my mouth so bad on the soup.