Post Fermentation Awesomeness

I've posted about a weird flavors in my beer before. But The hydrometer sample I took when bottling was so promising. Incredible hop aroma, the malt was shining through. It was just great. I bottled and three weeks later it's all gone. No aroma, no malt, just an odd taste. Im not sure how to describe the taste and with what vocabulary. It's almost astringent, but sweet. All of my beers have had it and it never really goes away with time. I've changed all sorts of things in the process (AG). I've started throwing oxygen in, and after that change the hydrometer sample was the best yet. But after bottling no aroma, no hops and an odd taste.

Is it priming sugar? Is it an infection? Why before bottling is it great beer but after bottling it's awful?

By the way sorry if this isn't the correct section for this thread to be in.

I have a batch that had something similar happen.

I tasted the hydro sample and it was amazing.

After 3 weeks in the bottle, has sort of a phenolic taste to it.

I just threw the bottles in my fermentation chamber to lager for a few weeks, apparently this can help clean up kolsch yeast.

blackstrar - Have you been following memalty.com pitching rates? Do you leave the beer on primary long enough and in a comfortable temp for the yeast to clean up after themselves??

BrewNow said:

blackstrar - Have you been following memalty.com pitching rates? Do you leave the beer on primary long enough and in a comfortable temp for the yeast to clean up after themselves??

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I would think problems caused by the factors you mentioned would be apparent before bottling.

What do you use for bottle sanitizer?

I had this exact type of thing happen to a batch of Arrogant Bastard clone and it made me quite angry. After 4 weeks in the bottle it was almost un-drinkable so I had my LHBS guru taste it and he said it was trace amounts of chlorine left in the bottle. He said that the yeast will react to that by throwing an off-flavor noted as the "bandaid flavor" because it tastes and smells a bit like that. He told me to let the bottles sit for at least 2 months and the yeast should clean up the bad flavor. I let a case of 22oz bombers sit for 3 months (that was VERY hard to do by the way!) and the beer tastes pretty damn good now.

I have since skipped the bleach water soak and rinse routine on my bottles and now only do a hot water rinse followed by a 2 minute Idophor soak. All is well now.

I use iodophor. I run the bottles throughout the dishwasher without soap and on the heat cycle. I then do a quick rinse in iodophor before filling them up.

Hmmm, this doesn't make sense to me. If it was good before bottling, but then turns "off", it seems like an infection. Anything else going on besides a lack of flavor? Sourness? With the astringency, do you get any medicinal type clove flavors?

What is your water chemistry like?

There definitely something else there other than lack of flavor. I'm not sure how to describe it... its sour but not like a lactic acid kind of sour its sort of astringent. It almost reminds me of licorice. Not cloves like a weizen.

Since it tasted fine until you bottled it, I suspect it is a problem with your bottling equipment.

I had a batch with a similar off flavor. I figured out I had a little scum growing in my transfer hose because I didn't dry it. I was sanatizing with Idofor, but that wasn't enough to kill it. Buy a new hose.

Since then I keep a cooler filled with bleach water and my hoses, auto siphon, etc. soak all week. The spigot of your bottling bucket is another suspect. I take mine out every time and it goes in the bleach solution, too.

Check out this chart about off flavors in beer
http://www.winning-homebrew.com/off-flavors.html

Sour # 6 on the list is what I had.

Is it common to remove the spigot from the bucket to Sanitize it? I feel like a completely dissambled spigot would be best to negate any possible infection. I did get new tubing too...but ill see about the rest of the equipment.

Before going down the infection route, take a look at the BJCP off-flavors chart to see if the taste can fit in a category:

http://www.bjcp.org/docs/Beer_faults.pdf

And if not, consider easy things like fermentation temperature.

I have never seen this proven but I would bet that suspended yeast in the fermentation sample can hide off flavors. So the taste may have been there before but was unnoticeable in the presence of so much suspended yeast.

I can see the yeast hiding things...the beer was pretty clear though. Wlp002. That yeast is crazy flocculent. But it could have been roused up.

Its in all of my beers...but this time it didn't show up until after bottle conditioning. Its just weird. It never went away in the other beers. Ill see if this one is different over time. Ill try going crazy with sanitation measures when I bottle my bitter this week.

On another note anyone have experience with the 4.6 cf fridgidaire for fermentation. I'm doing 2 gal batches now. But when I manage to produce beer that doesn't taste bad ill go back to 5 gallons and make a cabinet out of the fridge.

Nice chart ayoungrad. On that one I had both vinagary & sour and acidic. I obviously disagree with not using bleach. I have been using it for three years.

I just remembered, that is when I bought my auto siphon. Good time to upgrade.

blackstrat5 said:

I can see the yeast hiding things...the beer was pretty clear though. Wlp002. That yeast is crazy flocculent. But it could have been roused up.

Its in all of my beers...but this time it didn't show up until after bottle conditioning. Its just weird. It never went away in the other beers. Ill see if this one is different over time. Ill try going crazy with sanitation measures when I bottle my bitter this week.

On another note anyone have experience with the 4.6 cf fridgidaire for fermentation. I'm doing 2 gal batches now. But when I manage to produce beer that doesn't taste bad ill go back to 5 gallons and make a cabinet out of the fridge.

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Given that this is a recurrent problem...

You absolutely must use fermentation temperature control. There is no way around this. Even if it is utilizing a cool basement or using a swamp cooler. Keep in mind the wort fermentation temperature is 3-10 degrees higher than ambient. And IMHO you want to aim for the low end of recommended temperatures or lower.

Also, your water may be an issue. If there is chloramine, you need to either filter your water, use campden tablets or use store bought water (+/- salts depending on the type of store bought water). If not, you will get off-flavors.

Now that you mention you are using the Fuller's strain, I was just reminded of a couple other people who similarly have changes (and not for the better) from bottle conditioning with that yeast. Their hypothesis was it had something to do with the bottling process itself, that caused these issues. You might want to read through some of this thread, or post there and get more information from the guys who have noticed this, too.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/b...on-temps-profiles-cybi-other-thoughts-221817/

I haven't had any such problems myself, but when I think about it, I've only ever used the Fuller's yeast in brown ales and porters, and not often at that. Those beers are a bit more full flavored, and might hide such changes a bit.

mrk305 said:

Nice chart ayoungrad. On that one I had both vinagary & sour and acidic. I obviously disagree with not using bleach. I have been using it for three years.

I just remembered, that is when I bought my auto siphon. Good time to upgrade.

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Bleach can absolutely be a problem if present in fermentation. What you (and I for most of the time) have is a good rinsing routine. What happened for me was I did not rinse the bottles enough before idophor soak. I remember them still smelling like bleach a tiny bit as they went on the drying rack. I did not think it would be a problem until it was, and it really sucked. My point is that bleach can work fine, but it MUST be removed completely before fermentation.

What has been working great for me for the last 4 batches is to eliminate the whole bleach step, and just do a 120 degree hot water rinse (with visual solids eyeball check) followed by 2 min idophor soak. This saves me a lot of time and effort on bottling day and has not yielded any off flavors or bottle infections (bottle bombs) either.

Sorry for resurrecting this....but. I was drinking a Full Sail Pale Ale today and had one of those tortilla chips "hint of lime" and queso and that homebrew flavor I keep lamenting about popped out. I don't really taste it in the beer normally, but it was there. I'm wondering if that chip combination maybe made the esters come out front and center. I lost all hop and malt presence just like my homebrews... Maybe it's esters? I know I ferment at the will of apartment temp, which the strip on the fermenter usually reads at 68-70 through fermentation. Any thoughts?