How long to wait for improvement before tossing it all?

On June 5, I made a batch of an alpha king clone. Pretty good going in to the primary. June 13, even better going in to the secondary. June 24, really good going in to the bottles. Fast forward to July 15th - I eagerly open a bottle. Nice "pssst", pours very nice, good head....take a swig....Bleckhhhh!!! (Picture Spaulding drinking from a glass full of whiskey and cigarette butts in Caddyshack). Alright, maybe still a little green. Give it some more time. Fast forward to yesterday. It tastes as atrocious as the first day I opened it.

Alright, I'm not going to lament about where this one went wrong. I just need to re-trace my steps and see where a problem arrived. My question is at what point do you say the hell with it, give up all hope, pour the swill down the drain and re-use the bottles? I mean, after three months, is all hope lost or is more time needed?

If it was undrinkable in July, and it's undrinkable now, it won't get better.

I wonder if it got contaminated in the bottling process. If it tasted good before you bottled, then something happened going into the bottle. Do you want to run through your steps? Maybe we could pick something out.

Do you use bleach to sanitize?

If it tasted good coming out of the secondary but bad in the bottles, your problem could be your bottles.. in which case they might not all be swill.

..think back, way back... "did I star san all the bottles, or did I get lazy and just kinda spit shine the last half?"

..serioiusly though, hope you can figure out what went wrong.

PS.. you didn't siphon with your mouth did you?

For this particular batch I used bleach as a first step sanitation process since many of the bottle were somewhat horrible. I followed that with an individual rinse in the sink, and a dishwashing cycle.

Thus far, the bottles that I have tried (about 10 of them) have all sucked the same, so I suspect this batch may have gotten polluted at one of two times:

1) during the bottle bucket phase. Just a case of oxidation. Or,

2) during the dry hop. This time around I uses a cut stocking as the hop bag. I thought I had read about that somewhere. This particular bag/stocking was dyed black. I cleaned it, boiled it, and otherwise sanitized it. Even though the batch tasted good at bottling, I wonder if the dye leached and caused some horrific off flavors as carbonation was taking hold.

I would suggest consulting with some folks to get a diagnosis on your brew. LHBS, club, or maybe swap with someone on here.

If you have space and bottles, I'd park it until 2010 and revisit it then, perhaps sampling a bottle in 2009. But with no description other than horrible, it's hard to be sure. What sort of atrocious does it taste? Cardboard, plastic, mold, or what?

c1377 said:

PS.. you didn't siphon with your mouth did you?

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I thought that mouth siphon was one of the only options if you didn't have an auto-siphon. If this is bad, then what's the other option aside from an auto-siphon?

What's frustrating is that it's really hard to describe the taste. The first thing I thought of when I first tried it was 'rubbery'. It's really not like anything I have tasted before.

And I used an auto-siphon.

Dagatris said:

I thought that mouth siphon was one of the only options if you didn't have an auto-siphon. If this is bad, then what's the other option aside from an auto-siphon?

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fill your siphon tube with water, pinch off the end you want the beer coming out of, stick the other end in your beer, release the other end into a bucket, once all the water is out of the tube and a little bit of beer has come out, move the tube into your bottling bucket.

Fill siphon with boiled and cooled water. Clamp off or (lacking clamp) put sanitized finger over end. Drop in beer, let water flow out to a waste container, clamp off and/or move to beer container when water is out and siphon is full of beer.

For the first time I think I don't agree with my esteemed collegue Yooper..Only because what someone considers "undrinkable" is purely subjective....Are we talking infected undrinkable? Is it Vinegar? Is it Sour? Is it metallic? or is it "green?" Or is it just something we're not used to, either stylistically or some further intangible......Especially if the person judging it is still relatively new to the processes that homebrew goes through.

Plus is it a "big beer" or just a standard gravity ale...bigger beers take longer.

There's way too many variables for us to advise you without tasting it for ourselves...you'll have to make up your own mind...

Personally I would wait 6 months before deciding a beer is undrinkable...because So many surprising things can happen...things we really can't scientifically define..

Take a read of this thread of mine, especially the followup afterwords from a couple weeks ago when an over 6 months old sixer of the beer was discovered and was the rave of a recent party with a bunch of brewers.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/ne...virtue-time-heals-all-things-even-beer-73254/

Revvy, thanks for the info. Unfortunately, I think an exorcism is the only thing that will save this beer. I'll stash it and check again in a few months. Like you say, you never know.

Revvy said:

For the first time I think I don't agree with my esteemed collegue Yooper..Only because what someone considers "undrinkable" is purely subjective....Are we talking infected undrinkable? Is it Vinegar? Is it Sour? Is it metallic? or is it "green?" Or is it just something we're not used to, either stylistically or some further intangible......Especially if the person judging it is still relatively new to the processes that homebrew goes through.https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/ne...virtue-time-heals-all-things-even-beer-73254/

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I agree here, 100%. Whether the beer improves depends entirely on what makes it undrinkable now. I've had beers that were downright awful a few weeks out of the secondary. A few weeks or months or so later, I could barely keep my hands off them.

Keep it around as long as you have room!


TL

Revvy said:

For the first time I think I don't agree with my esteemed collegue Yooper..Only because what someone considers "undrinkable" is purely subjective....Are we talking infected undrinkable? Is it Vinegar? Is it Sour? Is it metallic? or is it "green?" Or is it just something we're not used to, either stylistically or some further intangible......Especially if the person judging it is still relatively new to the processes that homebrew goes through.

Personally I would wait 6 months before deciding a beer is undrinkable...because So many surprising things can happen...things we really can't scientifically define..

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TexLaw said:

I agree here, 100%. Whether the beer improves depends entirely on what makes it undrinkable now. I've had beers that were downright awful a few weeks out of the secondary. A few weeks or months or so later, I could barely keep my hands off them.

Keep it around as long as you have room!

TL

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I will defer to these guys, then! I was just going by the OP's story that it tasted good until bottled, so I was thinking bottle contamination. Especially since it hasn't improved at all in nearly three months in the bottle.

But, I think you guys are right- maybe see exactly what "bad" is before tossing it. If it's just young beer, it would improve.

I wonder if the bleach sanitizer is responsible?

YooperBrew said:

I wonder if the bleach sanitizer is responsible?

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I am so not a fan of bleach for sanitizing...especially with chlorinated water...more chlorine in the pipeline means the greater the potential for chlorophenols....

There's so much better things out there these days for cleaning and sanitizing....Oxyclean for cleaning and good no-rinse sanitizer like iodophor or starsan for sanitization....

I agree with Yooper. If is was OK prior to the bottle and is now bad. It probably will not get better.

If you know a HB buddy or can take a bottle to the LHBS you can ask for feedback.

Most of the time my beers don't taste bad when young, just not ready, overly yeasty or hot from alcohol. Time makes these things go away.

I once had beer w/ a slight metalic taste totally clear up. This beer was drinkable just not really palatable at the time. I had at least 4-5 other beer styles that I could drink. Its rare that I have this occurr since I don't rush to get my beers out of the primary or 2ndary. I also brew frequently

Anyhow....If you think its nasty like rotten milk, vomit or wet dog then I'd dump it and try again. This assumes you can't drink more than 1-3 sipps.

Look through this thread and pick up one of the T's to use instead of sucking on the end of the tube your beer will go through...

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/flyguys-t-siphon-3-replacement-autosiphon-25774/

I am thinking it was the bleach. Also did I read that you washed them in the dishwasher? If so, I hope you didn't use any soap. That too could be the culprit.

I just had a thought- if you don't have a homebrew club, or know someone who could give you feedback, maybe you could send one via UPS to someone here on HBT to try. Even knowing it's bad, maybe they could taste it and say,"Yep, definitely phenols" or "Oh, that's green beer", before you pitch the whole batch.

I'm NOT volunteering, but suggesting that may work for you in this case.

DutchK9 said:

I am thinking it was the bleach. Also did I read that you washed them in the dishwasher? If so, I hope you didn't use any soap. That too could be the culprit.

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That could be it. It was a case where I had the bottles in the dishwasher and the Mrs., God love her, filled it up with soap and fired it up. I never really thought much about it because I followed that up with one step cleaning. Maybe I just didn't do a good enough job.

Oh well, a myriad of lessons to be learned.