Chemically smells in ferment

Hello im "trying" to get a sour prog4am under way at home in very small test batches. Im working on a simple blonde ale as my base recipe and am experimenting with some new ferment techniques and environments i have not brewed in before.

I am brewing a blonde ale, mashing at 66C and fermenting in growlers. In doing a primary ferment with sacc. WL Belgian Bastogne yeat and The ferment temp is very stable at 20C.

After about a week, i crack the fermentation vessels, 3 growlers per brew, and find that the beer tastes and smells solventy, like chemicals. I dumped the first batch, now i have fermented the second and 2/3 growlers have the same issue. One is fine so far, aromas that are expected from Bastogne or Ardennes, but the other two are foul.


Nothing wrong so far?

Well today i brewed a third, same process, same beer. As i was sanitizing the growlers, first with a 30 minute PBW soak then a rinse with sani. After sanitizing the 3 growlers the resultant water was noxious and brown colored. I feel like i lost a few brain cells just smelling it.

Im wondering is there something wrong with my ferment temp, the high mash temp, or my process, or does PBW react with my sanitizer in bad ways that is affecting my beer in the fermenters?

Is this a common smell of bastogne yeast when fermenting? (Unlikely i feel)

Fyi, its a Potasium Metabisulfite sanitizer

You say chemical smell. Have you tried any? It is important to pin down the flavor as exactly as possible. There can be many flavors that are off in beer (see link below) and diagnosing it correctly is important to fixing it.
No your temp is good at 20C (68F) and solvent usually comes from higher fermentation temps (27C or 80F and higher). It could also be oxidation. But it could also be that your yeast is performing as expected given it is a sour. And according to WL, that particular yeast is a high gravity yeast. So are you doing a high gravity beer?

A last thing on the smell verses taste - usually the two are linked. But it is possible for a strong nose in the growler to not make it into the bottle. If the smell is in the air, then it is potentially out of the beer. So this gets back to have you taken a sip or not yet? And can you give more explaination to the 'chemical' I picked solvent out of the list (see link below) but could it be medicine/Band-Aid/chlorine? That is a totally different problem, caused by Chlorine usually from your sanitizers. I'd recommend a water rinse of the PBW before the rinse with the sanitizer. I'm unable to locate info on what chemicals make up PBW, however so I don't know if it is a Chlorine compound or not.



https://www.morebeer.com/content/homebrew-off-flavors