trub tasting beer

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Hercules Rockefeller

Hercules Rockefeller

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Hey everybody, I have a question about some beers I just started drinking yesterday. they have a nasty, sour taste like the smell of the trub in the bottom of my fermenter after the beer is racked off of it. when I racked my beer from the primary to the secondary fermenter, I wasn't too carefull and I ended up stirring up a bunch of the trub, to the point that when it was first in the secondary fermenter it was so cloudy it looked like chocolate milk. but after being in the secondary fermenter for a week, the yeast had settled out and the beer was very clear. but now I have that taste in my beer. Is this something that additional bottle conditioning will help (it's been bottle conditioning for 2 1/2 weeks) or do I just need to me more careful with the racking in the future?

Thanks!!
 
Are you sure they aren't infected?

Racking some trub over is no big deal. I do it all the time. It settles out and you're all set.

How old is the beer in total? Maybe you haven't let it sit long enough.
 
It had 6 days in primary, 7 days in secondary, and then it has been bottle conditioning for 2 1/2 weeks, so overall it's about a month old. The thought of an infection hadn't occured to me, as it tastes like the smell of trub, which to me is nasueating, but now that you mention it that might be the case. maybe I'll wait a couple of weeks and see if it is any better before dumping the whole batch.
 
Do you not like hops?

What was the recipe you used?

I used the trub once to bake a loaf of bread, I fugured it's mostly yeast.... Hops bread, anyone?
 
If it is a sour, unpalatable odor and taste, it might be bacterial infection. I had a similar problem with a batch I bottled in January - bad smell when I racked to secondary, and it never went away. If you can drink it, do. If not, try again. Know that no deadly bacteria can survive beer with at least 3% ABV, so it's not unhealthy, just not too tasty.
 
Thor said:
Know that no deadly bacteria can survive beer with at least 3% ABV, so it's not unhealthy, just not too tasty.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Where did you see that? I was always under the impression that the acidic pH of beer was what made it impossible for pathogens to survive. I have never read that there was a specific alcohol tolerance.
 
I agree that it sounds like an infection, maybe a lag time thing, but even with this T1 connection it is hard to pick up the aroma over the internet. I say give it time. I have never heard of long term problems coming from trub transfer into a secondary. Now if you leave the beer on the trub too long ( and that means long) the yeast will take a liking to the trub and start eating it, which produces some nasty by-products. But I would look at pitching rates, wort chilling and aeration as some solutions.
 
Janx said:
Interesting. Where did you see that? I was always under the impression that the acidic pH of beer was what made it impossible for pathogens to survive. I have never read that there was a specific alcohol tolerance.
Click to expand...

Honestly, I don't remember. I thought it was somewhere in Palmer, or BYO, or one of those encyclopedic books or magazines, but I do remember it. And thank goodness, otherwise I suspect there would be a lot of deadly sick folks (formerly?) on this board! ;)
 
casebrew said:
Do you not like hops?

What was the recipe you used?

I used the trub once to bake a loaf of bread, I fugured it's mostly yeast.... Hops bread, anyone?
Click to expand...

I used a brewmart Kit, the one that is supposed to be like Corona (don't blame me, my wife bought it for me) so there was no hops in the trub it is just the light brown sediment from the dead yeast. I did notice that the yeast layer was quite thick in the bottle, about 1/8 or an inch or maybe more that's why I was wondering if this can be the result of getting too much dead yeast in the secondary and then in the bottle.
 
Hercules Rockefeller said:
I used a brewmart Kit, the one that is supposed to be like Corona (don't blame me, my wife bought it for me) so there was no hops in the trub it is just the light brown sediment from the dead yeast. I did notice that the yeast layer was quite thick in the bottle, about 1/8 or an inch or maybe more that's why I was wondering if this can be the result of getting too much dead yeast in the secondary and then in the bottle.
Click to expand...

Corona has some hops in it, otherwise it wouldn't get skunky and need lime to hide the skunk smell.;)

You can have quite a bit of sediment in a bottle without bad taste. Your desription is kinda vague, do you know what hops and yeast taste like?

Can you taste a package of yeast? Even bread yeast, just to compare the taste. Likewise, taste a sample of hops. A small sample, a very small sample. Very bitter stuff. Or find a very hoppy beer to try.

First batch, I used a kit. Then I spent long time readin the net before going to all grain, never bought a kit again. Try a google search for <homebrew beer recipe _____> (Insert brand), you will usually get zillions of choices. It cost me $14 for my last 50 bottle batch, and I know what each component tastes like....
 
I am a bread baker myself, I am interested to hear how that hop bread turned out.

Also, in "The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing," on page 26, it mentions that there are now know deadly pathogens that can survive in beer.
 
It's definitely not a hoppy flavor. I'm a confirmed hop head so I'd have no problem with overly hoppy (an oxymoron if ther ever was one) flavor. The best way to explain this is that the taste and aroma of the beer is just like the smell that comes out of the fermenter when you dump the sediment out of it after racking the beer out. there's some malt and hop flavor but it is being completely overwhelmed by this truby flavor. So far I've only used all extract kits (except for a stout I just started) so there's been no physical hops involved, these are the type of kits where the malt extract can is pre hopped. So the sediment I'm refering too is just the dead yeast cells, it looks pale brown and sandy. Hope this clarifies my description on the problem. Thanks for all the feedback everybody!
 
That was my first brew also. I have it sitting in bottles for the last week. Going to open one up this weekend to see how they are doing. When I tasted it when I bottled I found it to be quite bitter and harsh. I get to see what bottle conditioning actually means. I just think that the brew mart mexican ale kit, whatever it's called, is just a pretty cheap icky beer. Would it be the 2Lbs of corn sugar that is giving it the rocket fuely taste.

It was reminiscent of the beer my brother and I brewed about ten years ago, with a primary we got from the local chinese food place that had previously contained soy sauce, bottled directly into Gatorade bottles that a health nut friend supplied us with. Worst beer ever! After brewing my last two, I'm trying to decide if it was some kind of oxidation because of the plastic bottles, the fact that we used regular cane sugar, or if some of the soy sauce came through.

We did end up finishing it all off. It became the reserve beer after we would run out of the good stuff.

The brewmart mexican just kind of tasted like a mellower version of that first beer experiment.
 
vasie said:
I am a bread baker myself, I am interested to hear how that hop bread turned out.
Sorry, I thought I said- INEDIBLE. It was like eating pure hops. Didn't rise much either, maybe trub has sooo much hops that it kills the yeast in that concentration? I use pellets in a sock, the bread was green- the color of organic? I like yeasty bread, maybe I just put in tooo tooo much?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
the mystery of my funky beer is getting a bit more confusing. I tried more of the beer and some other bottles that came from the same batch have the bad flavor, some do not. the difference appears to be that I added chili to part of the batch, but not all, becuase I did not want to put the whole batch at risk of being too spicy. So what I did was, when I transfered to the secondary, I transfered a bout a quart of beer into a 40 bottle and the rest into the carboy. I put 3 jalapenos and 5 chipotles in the 40, and let it continue fermenting. so basically I had a chili beer concentrate. then when It came time for bottling I bottled half the batch, then added the chili beer from the 40 into the bottling bucket and bottled the rest. now the non chili beer has the horrible taste and the chili beer tastes great. So my theory is that the spice in the chilis along with a slightly higher alcohol content ( I soaked the chilis in vodka to sanitize them prior to putting them in the 40 bottle) killed the infection. any thoughts on my theory?
 
I got too much trub into one of my batches. At first it tasted kind of weird, but over time it all settled out and the beer tasted great. It took about 2-3 months, though, for it to really get good.
 

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