Better Bottle Question

I've had a Baltic porter in secondary in a temp. controlled environment (59-degrees) for close to three months. It's starting to smell heavily of plastic. Cause for concern?

I doubt you can get a plastic flavor from a better bottle. It could be a phenolic from a wild yeast infection. Why don't you keg/bottle it up now? 3 months is a way long time. I'd start to be concerned with oxidation.

It's not the vessel.

It could be coming from your keezer or developing an off flavor associated with poor cleaning process, chloramines or chlorine. Can't find the link right now but search plastic/band aid/ medicinal off flavors

I'm in the same position as the OP.

I have been fermenting in a consistent 59F basement and getting a really bad plastic smell in several of my beers - all english and american yeasts.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Better Bottles insulate more than glass, making ferm temps higher than we expect. I have considered Chloramine, also.

I have a small experiment running right now. I'll update.

corkpuller said:

I'm in the same position as the OP.

I have been fermenting in a consistent 59F basement and getting a really bad plastic smell in several of my beers - all english and american yeasts.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Better Bottles insulate more than glass, making ferm temps higher than we expect. I have considered Chloramine, also.

I have a small experiment running right now. I'll update.

Click to expand...

Curious about your experiment but IME in using buckets, glass And BBs using proper fermentation control I can tell you that 62F is 62F regardless of the vessel it's in

It's kinda like a measurement of weight, an ounce is an ounce whether its in a plastic cup or or pint glass, it's still an ounce

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corkpuller said:

I'm in the same position as the OP.

I have been fermenting in a consistent 59F basement and getting a really bad plastic smell in several of my beers - all english and american yeasts.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Better Bottles insulate more than glass, making ferm temps higher than we expect. I have considered Chloramine, also.

I have a small experiment running right now. I'll update.

Click to expand...

We have fermented hundreds of batches in BB's and there has never been any plastic smell. Our ambient below ground temp is in the low 60's. If you smell anything it isin your process or water and not the BB...

Are you smellng it from the neck of the BB or drawing a sample? When i first used my BB, smelling from the neck resulted in a rubbery smell. Stupid me took a couple times before I realized it was the rubber stopper i was smelling.

I've used BBs for every one of my batches (except the stout I did in my bottling bucket). None has had any hint of plastic, including the mead that spent around 6 months in it.

As to thermal conductivity, from a quick Internet search, plastics like the BB do have a lower conductivity by a factor of about 5 (~0.2 W/(m*K) vs ~1 W/(m*K)). However, the BB plastic is also much thinner, easily less than 1/5 the thickness of carboy glass, so it should have a higher heat transfer rate than a carboy. An external thermometer on the BB should be more tightly coupled to the internal temperature during changes than the same one on glass.

So today I racked to keg. The beer itself doesn't have a plastic taste. The smell was coming from the better bottle inside a mini fridge for months on end.

Re the question of temperature. My temp controller is inside the beer and I only have a deviation of one degree so it wasn't getting warmer than it should.

Anyway, happily the beer isn't ruined.