Plastic off flavor

I made a CDA a few months ago. I sampled it this weekend and I am getting a PVC or band-aid flavor from the beer.

Yeast is SafAle 05.
Water is Mt Olympus (an artesian mineral water source in Salt Lake). which is not treated with any chlorine so far as I know, but it is flouridated. -It's ozonated and UV disinfected.
I sanitize with StarSan and clean with PBW.
My fermentor is a Better Bottle carboy (I am replacing those with glass carboys).

Any ideas what this could be?

sounds like polyphenols, which give a band-aid/plastic taste, or so i have heard. also, watch out with glass carboys, they are heavy, and can cause serious injuries if they break while your carrying them.

dkm11b said:

sounds like polyphenols, which give a band-aid/plastic taste, or so i have heard. also, watch out with glass carboys, they are heavy, and can cause serious injuries if they break while your carrying them.

Click to expand...

hmm. I did dry hop the beer using 1 oz of columbus hops in a stainless steel 'cage'.

I had a similar taste on one batch. I tracked it down, or so I think, to my vinyl tubing and siphon. I had used really hot water to sanitize them, so much so that it warped the siphon. So I think this released some plastic like flavors when I racked my beer and bottled it. A very costly mistake for such cheap items!

I replaced my tubing, got a 1/2" siphon and the next batch did not have this problem.

The most common causes of that particular off flavor are chlorine / chlorophenols in your water or dramatically underpitching your yeast. It's usually the water. I don't know if fluoride can cause that same reaction or not.

Under pitching can give you those flavors too. In my experience, the flavors don't really seem to improve with time either. Fingers crossed that yours do get better!

I've found off flavors most commonly come from either pitching or fermenting too hot.

Check out this page for some info on the cause and a description of common off flavors:

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

I tapped the keg last night after letting it sit out in the cold for a while and the plastic taste was minute -so it seems as if time helped this one.

Pretty tasty beer, but not quite as 'big' as I'd have hopped for. -I was aiming for something like the Deschutes Hop in the Dark or Uintah Breweries Duhbe.

Since this batch, I replaced the thick wall PVC tubing with some high temp thermoplastic tubing from Northern Brewer and have swapped the bronze valve out to a Stainless BLINGmann ball valve.