weird observation about bottling

so I've been brewing with grain for about 5 years now, and I've always been slightly disappointed with certain beers - pretty much anything from pale through to amber, but my dark beers have been fine. The weird thing was I always take a sample from the fermenter while I'm bottling and it tasted fine, but after 3 weeks in the bottle the taste had completely changed for the worse.

I had an APA recently where I filled half the bottles to the near top (usually I leave about an inch of headspace) and those fuller bottles tasted absolutely better than those with more headspace. It's not about cleanliness or sanitation, I'm confident. All I can think of is that extra oxygen in the headspace is causing the off-flavors.

Has anyone had a similar experience? I wish I could go back to those dozens of brews and fill the bottles slightly more..

I never tried that, but it makes total sense. I similarly noticed a huge improvement in my IPAs when I switched to kegging... which I believe to be the oxygen factor.

My IPAs would taste fantastic at bottling... the last IPA I bottled was a Simcoe and Amarillo IPA and it had the most absolute distinct tangerine flavor at bottling... it was amazing. Fast forward two weeks and the beer was just 'meh'... absolutely zero tangerine.

Its definitely the oxygen. The chemicals in hops oxidize and change very quickly. Any time I do a hoppy beer its all c02 xfers and c02 purging of bottles with counter pressure fillers.

I bottle condition and if I have to restart the syphon during bottling I often forget to remove the filler and get bubbles... So any of those bottles I mark to drink first hoping the oxidation isn't too fast. Of course I use the O2 barrier caps.

A similar thing happens with all my hoppy beers I bottle. There will be subtle hop flavors that are totally gone by the time they've carbed up. It's always been my assumption that kegging is simply required to produce superb hoppy beers, but it is even possible to keep the hop flavor in bottled beer? Because the yeast undergo another fermentation to carbonate, they disturb sensitive hop compounds. So either way, your flavors will be morphed just by the process of bottling.

ShareBrewing said:

A similar thing happens with all my hoppy beers I bottle. There will be subtle hop flavors that are totally gone by the time they've carbed up. It's always been my assumption that kegging is simply required to produce superb hoppy beers, but it is even possible to keep the hop flavor in bottled beer? Because the yeast undergo another fermentation to carbonate, they disturb sensitive hop compounds. So either way, your flavors will be morphed just by the process of bottling.

Click to expand...

The trick to doing bottle conditioning on hoppy beers is purging all the bottles with c02 and capping immediatly. The process I take is I c02 xfer the beer into a keg which has been purged and has the priming sugar in it. Then from there I use a counter pressure filler to purge the bottles and cap them right as the cork from the bottle filler is removed so I have my partner do that as we go down the line. Any oxygen exposure is the issue. Although some chemicals are altered in fermentation the terpenes and glycosides in hops should not be alter unless introduced to oxygen. There are some strains of Brett that can alter glycosides and 1 known sacc strain but thats a whole different convo.

ShareBrewing said:

So either way, your flavors will be morphed just by the process of bottling.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure if this is true.. I've had some amazing bottled hop-forward beers.