Kegged portion is great but bottles taste yeasty ??

Made 2 batches of kit brew in late September. Both had a 2 week primary and a 2 week secondary/clearing.

I transferred out of secondary into Corney kegs and from there took a case of each into bottles with carb tabs before force carbonating the kegs.

My problem: the kegs taste great but the bottles have a wicked yeast flavor but are nicely carbonated. They haven't gotten any better over the 2 months since bottling. (Kegs are long since empty)
They've been in the garage (~40F) for the past month with no improvement and putting them in the refrigerator to cold crash doesn't help either.

It doesn't appear that the yeast on the bottom is getting mixed in to create the flavor - when you pour it is perfectly clear. And I've tried only pouring a fraction to ensure I don't disturb the yeast sediment.

IDEAS?!?!

I'm planning to brew again soon and while I prefer the convenience of bottles I can store (over a keg I have to empty before brewing something else), I don't want to waste my time brewing beer only to ruin it during bottle conditioning.

What yeast is it? I normally find that my kegged stuff tastes totally different to my bottled stuff. The flavours are never as soft in the bottles, there is a pronounced hoppiness also, possibly due to the higher carbonation levels in the bottle generally.

Unfortunately I'm not always the best at taking notes, so... I know they were Safale yeasts that came with the kit but don't recall which variety. They were different for the 2 beers (one pink packet, one yellow).

The kit assembler said that the carb tabs could be to blame. I'm thinking they may have been old and somehow imparted bacteria. That or my bottle washing skills aren't as good as my keg washing skills.

johngaltsmotor said:

Unfortunately I'm not always the best at taking notes, so... I know they were Safale yeasts that came with the kit but don't recall which variety. They were different for the 2 beers (one pink packet, one yellow).

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Sounds like one of the yeasts (yellow packet) was S-23, a lager yeast. If you treated that batch like an ale and fermented at ale temps, that could explain the weird flavors.

but why did it taste great out of the keg? It was only the portion put in bottles and naturally carbonated with tabs that was yeasty.

The kit company is leaning towards the carb tabs being somehow contaminated. In all honesty I did get them off ebay to save a buck, it could be they were old or something.

The only other option I see is the bottles not being perfectly clean.

The next batch I'll bottle with corn sugar and hope for the best. Worse comes to worse it just means that I need to build a cold room and bottle everything in 5gallon stainless "bottles".

I'm sorry - I misread your post. I thought one batch was entirely in bottles, the other in a keg.

At what temperature did you condition once in bottles?

The bottles all sat in the dark at room temp (about 70-75F average) for a few weeks for carbonation.

I'm just going to bottle out of the keg next time. I never realized how simple it was to force carbonate and then bottle from the keg. Granted, my next chance won't likely be for a while as I just brewed a lager so between the 21day ferment and several months to lager I have plenty of time to prepare.