Sour beer/keg question

With your guys help I figured out that I wasn't cleaning my kegs properly (I was using Starsan, now use Oxiclean, lesson learned). I currently have an AHB lo carb AG Ale in a keg and the beer after 4 weeks is coming out with kind of a sour bite to it. I didn't clean that keg the way I should have because the beer was already kegged before I learned that I wasn't cleaning correctly.

Will this beer just get worse with age? My problem is I only have 2 kegs so this sour beer is taking up one keg that I could be putting an IPA in this weekend. Should I leave it and hope the beer gets better or will it just get worse?

Thanks!

Tim

I am not a pro at the sour beers, but I sure like to drink them. I don't think they will ever become not sour, they will "find themselves". From how I've heard it described, sour beers will go through a roller coaster ride from being good, then off balance, then back to good again. If you like sour beer, I would keep it. If this is just beer taking up space and you won't ever like it, what is the point to keeping it when you have something that will be drank waiting for a keg.

Did you use lme? If yes, was it fresh?

I didn't use LME.

timm747 said:

I didn't use LME.

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If it's bothering you to "waste" a keg that you could use for something a little closer to your palette, just bottle off the carbonated keg. Personally, I jam a bottling wand into the end of a picnic tap - You can search "BMBF" for a butt load of other options.

FWIW, my very first batch was a lager - I fermented it at room temp (Hey, I was new )
It was awful - I bottled off a 12 pack and forgot about it. Had one a few months later, and it was really quite good! If a beer is bugging you, you're better off letting at least some of it sit for a while (Months even) - Lots of stories here in the "Did I ruin my beer?!?" threads about crappy beer that turned out to be great, after a few months.

lurker18 said:

I am not a pro at the sour beers, but I sure like to drink them. I don't think they will ever become not sour, they will "find themselves". From how I've heard it described, sour beers will go through a roller coaster ride from being good, then off balance, then back to good again. If you like sour beer, I would keep it. If this is just beer taking up space and you won't ever like it, what is the point to keeping it when you have something that will be drank waiting for a keg.

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Not all sour beers will eventually come to find themselves. There are certain infections that give a good sour beer, where others just plain ruin your beer.

IrregularPulse said:

Not all sour beers will eventually come to find themselves. There are certain infections that give a good sour beer, where others just plain ruin your beer.

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I fully agree with that, sometimes an infection is just too much to come back from. I was just saying that from what I understand, some sour beers will change from good to bad several times over their lifetime, and a bottle that is bad one month may have a totally different taste some time later.

Myself, I don't think I would have the patients to bottle everything just to test a bottle every couple of months to see if the taste has come around. I am fortunate enough to not have dumped a batch yet, but I think if it ever came down to it, I would not think twice about doing it.

This isn't necessarily an infection. Sour bite could be yeast byproduct that will age out. My first S-04 had a sour bite that faded to S-04's normal diacetyl after a few weeks. The second generation of that yeast didn't have any sour bite phase to it. To me this sounds more like yeast fermentation issue than bacterial contamination.