Help in identifying off flavor please

Mostly out of curiosity, I was hoping to get a little feedback on what might have caused a temporary off flavor in my recent brew. I brewed the ferocious IPA from midwest, and for the first week in the bottle it had an aroma and flavor of what I can only think to describe as musty.

I had one on Thursday at 5 days in the bottle and it was quite palpable so I was kind of concerned, but now at 7 days the beer is considerably more carbed and the taste is 99% gone. Does anyone have any idea what this might have been?

did you re-use bottles? Or did a little bit of dry-hopping get it to a few bottles? When ever i have encountered musty flavors and aroma (earthy) I atribute it to mold and mold spores.

If you re-used bottles, some times one or two can get buy that have some crap still in them or mold spores you cant see. mold spors are really tough and can be hard to kill. if this is the case than one or two bottles might have a problem and the rest are fine...you just picked up the bad one first.

if some bits of dry hop got in the bottle, they could give you a slight grassy flavor, like the smell of a grass pile that has been sitting for a day or two.

these are just to things that come to my mind, but its hard to troubleshoot off flavors with out tasting them.

Bsquared said:

these are just to things that come to my mind, but its hard to troubleshoot off flavors with out tasting them.

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Definitely, and I know I'm not describing it all that well. I did reuse bottles but I think they were well cleaned and sanitized. I definitely did have a big problem with hop particles on bottling day though because this was my first time dry hopping and I made kind of a mess of it. I figured this was most likely related to the dry hopping.

unionrdr said:

That's why I use muslin hop sacks when dry hopping. It keeps that stuff contained. But what hops did you uise? Some,like Nugget,have an earthiness to them.

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I used warrior, ahtanum, and amarillo in the boil. Dry hopped with an ounce each of amarillo, ahtanum and citra.

I'm guessing the flavor was 'green' beer flavor... You drank them at 5 and 7 days in the bottle. Now the flavors gone as the beer conditions more.