Bad flavor when I bottle - can you help

I'm looking or some insights or something that i could do diferently. I stopped bottling my beers after my 6th or 7th batch. That was well over a year ago. I am currently fermenting my 30th beer. My beers have really gotten pretty good. I've come along way with sanitation, controlling my ferementation temps, etc.

However, there is one problem i can't seem to get away from lately - bad tastes (or offf flavors) in my bottled beer. Shortly after i built my keezer, i was kegging everything, not bottling much at all. But after 6 or 8 batches of doing that i missed not being able to have the portability of bottles. I started bottling 10-12 beers from every batch and then kegging the remainder 4 gallons or so. I used a 1 gal bottling bucket and scaled down the amount of priming sugar, or priming DME to about 1/5 the amount needed for a full batch. My beers carb well but i always had some of flavors associated with them. Almost a bandaid like flavor on the worst of them.

After much research i found that bleach can produce silmilar flavors. so i rinsed all my clean bottles several times and put the back into storage. I would sanitize the bottles using the little plunger bowl with a fresh batch of starsan. i then would boil my caps. fill bottles, then cap. Still bad flavors. Then i started putting carbed beer (from my cornies into bottles) still good carbination but i still have some off flavors.

Has anyone experienced something similar or provide me with some help? My keeged beer is awesome so i dont think it is anything up to transferring into kegs (ie fermenting, racking, etc).

Are the caps all from the same batch? Where do you store your caps? I know why but I keep coming back to the caps.

Are you using a bottling spigot? I was having a similar problem a couple years ago. Finally figured out that I had an infection hiding where the 2 pieces of the bottling spigot are pressed together. Started taking the spigot completely apart (running the spigot under hot water helps) before sanitizing, problem solved.

you mean same batch from the manufacturer? I have gone through 2 or 3 bags over the lasst year or so.

bad67z said:

Are the caps all from the same batch? Where do you store your caps? I know why but I keep coming back to the caps.

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anyone else help?

What do you use for bottling from the keg?

Also, try replacing some of the bottles with different ones and see if you still get the flavor. I'm guessing that there is a gap in your sanitation somewhere in bottling that is not in your kegging procedure. Start at the beginning and analyze everything to find the most likely causes and try to augment the procedure to eliminate the problem.

cobra tap fitted with a bottling tube.

Try replacing the stopper and bottling tube. Also, make sure to sanitize inside the cobra tap before bottling also. I replace my bottling tube and stopper every couple months because they are cheap enough and I don't want to take any chances. When you cut the bottling tube it leaves some pretty rough edges that will harbor crap.

Rather than bottling why not just get a couple of growlers. Whe you want to take a few with you somewhere mix up a little iodophor solution and sanitize the growler and lid real quick, then pour off a half gallon from the tap. The growled will keep fresh and carbed for several weeks. Takes all of the bottling equipment out of the equation, reducing chances of infection.

I would actually fill up a growler from the keg and wait a few days just to see if you get off flavors in the growler beer. If you do, then you know the problem is in the transfer to smaller containers. If you don't, then you have more likely pinpointed the problem to bottles and/or caps.

i'm still fighting this a bit. Im wondering if its coming directly from the kegs. My sanitation is good. i dont know what else i can do at this point. anyone else have suggestions?

I recently started pouring beers from my perlick taps. i have the perlicks that have the screw off spigot and found an adapter online. im now filling bottles using that adapter.

I know exactly the off-flavor you're talking about, the buddy I always brew with had this flavor consistently in the beers he bottled. The interesting thing was that I always brewed at his place with the same setup and never had that issue, but I always bottled my beer at my house. We're fairly certain it's an issue with the water that he used to sanitize the bottles with. He lives in the city and I live out about 30 minutes away and our tap water profiles are entirely different. I honestly don't know a great deal about the chemistry behind it, but his pH levels were very high. John Palmer has note about the medicinal flavor in his book, and that gave us the idea. For his last batch, he bought a couple gallons of bottled water to sanitize his bottles with and it yielded a batch completely free of the medicinal, bandaid flavors.

We've also noticed that with some bottle conditioning, the medicinal flavor fades over time, so you might not want to throw them out.

thanks a ton!

You speak wise for only 6 posts

All signs point to either your bottling wand or your water. If your water is treated with chloramine rather than chlorine, even tiny amounts can be enough to react with the yeast and create chlorophenols which often have a band-aid or burnt plastic flavor. I'd suggest using bottled water for sanitizing the bottles and see what happens.

when you guys say sanatizing - should i use bottled water to mix my starsan? I sanitize my bottles with starsan. I usually dont rinse the starsan, but have tried rinsing to see if it made any difference. it didnt.

kegtoe said:

when you guys say sanatizing - should i use bottled water to mix my starsan? I sanitize my bottles with starsan. I usually dont rinse the starsan, but have tried rinsing to see if it made any difference. it didnt.

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Correct, make your starsan solution with bottled water instead of tap water, and don't rinse. If you rinse the starsan off it kinda defeats the purpose of using it.

This thread just saves me a headache. Last two light lagers tasted fantastic but both had a clove like spicey taste that developed in the bottles but wasnt tasted since my Kolsch last summer. I'm going to test my current batch by using tap and idophor in 6 bottles.

SwampassJ said:

This thread just saves me a headache. Last two light lagers tasted fantastic but both had a clove like spicey taste that developed in the bottles but wasnt tasted since my Kolsch last summer. I'm going to test my current batch by using tap and idophor in 6 bottles.

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Definately sounds like chlorophenols. The two likely causes are wild yeast infection and chlorine/chloramine contamination.

Most cities/water companies will have a water report online or will provide you with the info if you ask, which at the very least will have the average chlorine levels. Didn't know about chlorophenols, that's interesting. For reference, the water that gave off flavors had 3.8 ppm of chlorine and the 'good' water was at 1.2. Hope it works out!

I had the same problem so often that I was going to quit brewing but since I started using the dishwasher to sanitize my bottles the problem went away so you might try that. I use the hot dry cycle and no detergent of course.. Good luck.

Unfortunately my dish washer doesn't have the sanitize cycle. Maybe in the next place.