apalke
Well-Known Member
I recently made an oatmeal stout and wanted to add a lot of chocolate and coffee flavors. To do this I added 8 oz baker's chocolate 5 minutes before flameout to melt the chocolate. We steeped 6 oz coffee a couple minutes after flameout.
I sampled the beer when I transferred to the secondary and when I bottled and both times it was spectacular... nice roasty toasty flavors as you would expect in a stout with a nice background chocolate flavor and slight aroma of coffee. A couple weeks after bottling the beer still tasted pretty good but not as great as I had remembered.
Now, maybe a month with the beers sitting in the bottles they've taken on a distinctly unpleasant sour flavor. I think I can rule out infection for three reasons:
-The beer tasted fine out of the bucket so at most only some of the bottles should have had some infection
-We've never had problems with sanitation and infections before or since
-After tasting the first batch from the bucket, I made a second batch and it also has the same unpleasant sour flavor. If some mysterious bug got into the first batch it's not extremely likely that it got my second batch too
My suspicion is that the oils from the cheap baker's chocolate I got from the grocery store went rancid with time sitting in the bottles. Maybe the slight exposure to air when bottling helped in this process? I've heard that chocolate oils can go rancid before, but I don't know exactly what to expect in this case. Anyone have any advice or suggestions?
I sampled the beer when I transferred to the secondary and when I bottled and both times it was spectacular... nice roasty toasty flavors as you would expect in a stout with a nice background chocolate flavor and slight aroma of coffee. A couple weeks after bottling the beer still tasted pretty good but not as great as I had remembered.
Now, maybe a month with the beers sitting in the bottles they've taken on a distinctly unpleasant sour flavor. I think I can rule out infection for three reasons:
-The beer tasted fine out of the bucket so at most only some of the bottles should have had some infection
-We've never had problems with sanitation and infections before or since
-After tasting the first batch from the bucket, I made a second batch and it also has the same unpleasant sour flavor. If some mysterious bug got into the first batch it's not extremely likely that it got my second batch too
My suspicion is that the oils from the cheap baker's chocolate I got from the grocery store went rancid with time sitting in the bottles. Maybe the slight exposure to air when bottling helped in this process? I've heard that chocolate oils can go rancid before, but I don't know exactly what to expect in this case. Anyone have any advice or suggestions?