Off Flavor that goes away in 30-40 minutes

Howdy !

so I brewed a full grain IPA Kit beer. believe it was about 10 lbs 2-row and 3 pounds of 15L 1 oz of chinook and 1 oz of centinual . and it was supposed to go 1 oz At 90 minutes, 1/2 oz at 20 minutes and dry hop with the rest.

But i did 1 oz at 90 and 1 oz at 22 and 1/2 or so of Willamette hops and Dry hopped with Willamette .

I Used White Labs 007 Ale yeast (I wanted to try Californian ale yeast but they were out)

pitched at 70 F and the fermentor hit 72/73 for a few days and then locked onto 70. the closet i was using saw a low-hi of 68-72

This has been my case for almost every batch i've made. Usually i use 1056 Ale yeast. I've made starters but the last 2 times i did not.

Also i use one of those aerators that slips into your 3/8 tubing. My setup is a Keggle that gravity drains through my plate chiller with the 3/8 tubing through the airlock opening and ends at the aerator bit.

Usually i also stir with a sanitized spoon for additional aeration, This time I did not.

But i've had this same off flavor several times.

left it in the fermentor for about 3 weeks , the beer tasted great at that point with out any real off flavors (tasted better then, than it does now IIRC)

I boiled a few cups of water and corn sugar following a carbonation calculator.


fast forward a month of bottle aging ... and the beer overall is pretty good. Its over carbonated .. but produces a Huge Head and really good head retention . there's an off flavor that you can smell when you pour the beer. drinking it shortly after pour you totally taste it too.

I've been bottling with 16 oz swing tops and i was drinking out of a 16 oz glass. so i had to pour wait like 5 minutes for the foam to die down. drink a little and then topped her off.

then i had to do my toddlers bedtime routine , and she got out of bed a few times in a row. It must have been 45 minutes easy until i went back to my beer.

almost all of the off flavor was Gone at that point.

a few of my friends (who do not brew) Like the beer and the off flavor does not bother them at all..

but to be honest it bugs the ever living :hs:!nestar:#nestar out of me

Oh i'm using the Garden hose outlet with an RV Hose attached. the water is totally drinkable , but does have a slight hint of "hose water" to it


. This batch was about 100 minutes of Mashing with 90 minutes of hop boiling . easily 3 hours of heated . oh and i used one of those campdem (what ever they sell you to remove chlorine ) tablets at the very start

Hmmmm, can you explain the flavor/aroma? Or did I miss it somewhere in your post???

I'm having a really hard time coming up with a description of the off flavor..

I don't have the best pallet and i'm just horrible at trying to describe flavors ...

Maybe Sort of like how a saison tastes if ever so slightly .. and you definitely smell it too.

wlp007's ideal fermentation temp says is 65-70 degrees. You said the first few days it fermented at 72/73 degrees which is probably when it was at peak fermentation. The heat spike was probably due to the reaction of fermentation. I've had off flavor issues with being just outside the optimal fermentation temp range before.
You left the beer in the primary for 3 weeks you said so that should have been enough time for the yeast to clean things up. So no off flavors should be due to that.

Whenever I have off flavors in my beer I always look at the fermentation temps first. Then, if there's no sign of an infection then I look at the water that was used. When I moved into our new house last summer I brewed with the tap water and it left an off flavor and smell in my beer. It was awful so I had to switch to bottled spring water and now everything is fine. If you've used the hose water for all your beer and all your beer has had this off flavor then I'd brew a batch with bottled water and see if it's still there or not. Some water just isn't suitable for brewing and fermentation brings that out.

Agreed, water and ferms temps are usually at the top of the list for troubleshooting off flavors. Kind of tough to do without an actual description, but I'm wondering if by saison like you mean a bit phenolic? Like plasticy or medicinal? Are you doing anything to remove chlorine/chloramine?

chickypad said:

Agreed, water and ferms temps are usually at the top of the list for troubleshooting off flavors. Kind of tough to do without an actual description, but I'm wondering if by saison like you mean a bit phenolic? Like plasticy or medicinal? Are you doing anything to remove chlorine/chloramine?

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Plasticy is what my beer was smelling/tasting like using tap water. It was terrible. I stupidly made a heady topper clone and had to dump the whole thing. It was indeed a sad day.

If it is overcarbed badly, as you said, it will have a sharp metallic taste. If you let it set out for a while, like you said, the carb level would drop and possibly get rid of the taste.

Others might see it different, but this makes the most sense to me.

It might be metallic tasting I'm not quite sure.. Might say funky as well. really hard time describing it, it doesn't ruin the beer but its just doesn't belong.

Shoot I've been bottle carbonating / aging in the same closet that i ferment in. with the 68-70 F range, but this last batch i drained into the bottling bucket and carried it upstairs to bottle (wife is pregnant and wanted company) which probably led to slightly increased temps (upstairs is usually 74-75)

Sounds like i have multiple things i can improve upon .. Lower temps and less carbonation for sure.

and my water Might be an issue, or at least the fact that i'm using an RV Hose. I do believe i've had a beer with out this off flavor before, but just once . Might have just been when it was colder outside and my closet was a bit colder.

I've since built an AC closet to ferment and age my bottles in.

I find that my most significant off-flavors come from one of two sources when I'm not careful -- and they resemble the vague descriptors you've given, so here they are.

1. Introducing any untreated municipal water into the beer. I often find that if I do this (be it via sanitizing solution, priming solution, etc., which I sometimes absentmindedly do when I'm brewing tired), I get off flavors associated with chlorine/chloramines. To me, that tastes plastic-y, or like some kind of synthetic material.

2. Oxidation. Especially if it's a very hoppy beer, since the hop oils oxidize easily (not to mention that we like to put a bit of extra alcohol in a lot of those beers, and alcohol oxidizes like gangbusters). This one tastes somewhat similar to the one above, except the taste/smell is more cardboard-like. It tends to happen if the fermentor is opened too often, if I use a secondary fermentor with too much headspace (don't use a secondary period), if the beer is sloshed during transfers/bottling, etc.

Hope this helps...

I think i boiled the priming sugar water for about 5-10 minutes ... I did nothing to treat it for chlorine either ..

:O lots of possible reasons for the off flavor... lots i can improve though..

What's a better procedure for my priming water situation? boil it longer or used bottled?


I could do a brew with all bottled water perhaps to eliminate some possible causes.


Just talked to my co-worker who also home brews, he said he used an RV garden hose briefly but always got weird off flavors, he stopped using the hose (carries way in jugs from his kitchen)

Which i could totally do .. would this work alright? as its so convenient to use the water source 5 feet away from where i'm brewing

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Camco-Water-Filter-with-Hose/14504321

As far as the brew water - one issue is overall water chemistry and mash pH, not sure if you are following that. But also is the problem of chlorine and chloramine - which can react with malt to make chorlophenols which can taste like plastic. Chlorine can be boiled off or filtered but it's harder to remove chloramine. I find the easiest way is to treat with a little campden. There is a good article here from A.J.

chickypad said:

As far as the brew water - one issue is overall water chemistry and mash pH, not sure if you are following that. But also is the problem of chlorine and chloramine - which can react with malt to make chorlophenols which can taste like plastic. Chlorine can be boiled off or filtered but it's harder to remove chloramine. I find the easiest way is to treat with a little campden.

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Yes.

A great way to check whether this is your issue or not would simply be to brew a batch using only store-bought distilled water (and a little calcium chloride or calcium sulfate in the mash if you're brewing all grain -- you need the calcium content) from start to finish. This would include your brewing water (including top up water if you do extract with partial boil), your priming solution, and for good measure, your sanitizer if you use a spray bottle. For larger quantities of sanitizing solution (like for your fermentor), use house tap water treated with an appropriate amount of campden -- 1 tablet treats 20 gallons, so for sanitizing a 6.5 gallon fermentor, I usually throw in 1/3 - 1/2 tablet.

I'd try this with a simple recipe, probably in a less hop-focused style, to eliminate as many other variables as possible (maybe a basic blonde or amber). If it turns out well, then you can safely say that you've identified the problem and proceed from there. If not, you've eliminated one major possibility.

Wow i've never thought of treating my sanitizing / cleaning water ...

and i swear this beer had no off flavor when i bottled it (sampled the 4 oz left in the bottling bucket)

Thanks for all the input / suggestions.. much to try next brew day ...

A1337sti said:

Wow i've never thought of treating my sanitizing / cleaning water ...

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I do it because I'm uptight. Still, some of it always ends up in your beer, and chloramines have an impressively low flavor threshold.

The easy solution is to send it in to a competition, and let the judges tell you what the problem is.

That is, assuming they ever mail you your score-sheets back.

I'm also going with over carbonation. I keg and have over carbonated several batches after I bought a new CO2 regulator. The beer really tasted bad but I knew it was over carbonated. I took a spoon and stirred the hell out of it in my pint glass and it tasted much better. Fortunately I keg so I just took it off of the gas and within a day or two it tasted fine. I can't think of any other off flavor that would fade within a few minutes.

One of my friends "helped" me last night and tasted some.

He said "juicyfruit" comes to mind. not a dead on, but i started to agree. My wife who has a great pallet couldn't really put a name to it either.


could be more than 1 thing wrong with it though I suppose.

I did bottle in swing tops, i could be crazy and leave one open over night and see if its better in the morning.. or flat ... lol

horrible idea?

I'm going to agree that it's likely the tap water. I always heard the if you can brew coffee with it and it's fine, then you can brew beer with it. So I used tap water on my very first batch and everything seemed to turn out fine except for a medicinal/plastic flavor. I hoped it would clean up with aging but it only refined the flavor and made it more prevalent. It's unfortunate because otherwise it turned out great. Since then I always fill up at the "glacier" water stations for $1.50 per 5 gallons. Haven't had that flavor/aroma since.

or perhaps in my case, the RV "drinking water garden hose" may be killing my otherwise really good tasting water.

my co-worker said to try a batch where i get my water from the kitchen sink.. only have to go down 1 flight of stairs ... lol worth it though if it works

A1337sti said:

or perhaps in my case, the RV "drinking water garden hose" may be killing my otherwise really good tasting water.

my co-worker said to try a batch where i get my water from the kitchen sink.. only have to go down 1 flight of stairs ... lol worth it though if it works

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If you do, *make sure* you treat it with campden.

Still, I recommend trying a batch with store bought distilled water. It costs you only a few extra bucks, and you can be absolutely sure that you've eliminated possible water issues as a variable, so you'll be able to determine with complete certainty whether that was your problem or not.

A1337sti said:

One of my friends "helped" me last night and tasted some.

He said "juicyfruit" comes to mind. not a dead on, but i started to agree. My wife who has a great pallet couldn't really put a name to it either.


could be more than 1 thing wrong with it though I suppose.

I did bottle in swing tops, i could be crazy and leave one open over night and see if its better in the morning.. or flat ... lol

horrible idea?

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If it is a fruity taste it could be just esters from stressed yeast. I had a APA fermented with S-05 end up with a fruit loops like taste. I dont recall if the fruity flavor dissipated with time in the glass or not, but it did stay fruity until the keg was kicked.

JordanKnudson said:

If you do, *make sure* you treat it with campden.

Still, I recommend trying a batch with store bought distilled water. It costs you only a few extra bucks, and you can be absolutely sure that you've eliminated possible water issues as a variable, so you'll be able to determine with complete certainty whether that was your problem or not.

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Good thing to do. Would using a garden hose filter be "just as good" as store bought distilled ? or no?

ba-brewer said:

If it is a fruity taste it could be just esters from stressed yeast. I had a APA fermented with S-05 end up with a fruit loops like taste. I dont recall if the fruity flavor dissipated with time in the glass or not, but it did stay fruity until the keg was kicked.

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I used white labs 007 dry ale yeast (wanted to try Northern California yeast but they were out)

While i usually do a starter i just dumped the tube in (instructions said it should be fine if my OG is lower than 1.062 i believe and mine was 1.060 or 1 rather just shy of 15 brix (refractorometer no correction made)

SOOO Eager to try an other batch and correct this issue. My wife is pregnant with Twins (due in 16 days) so finding brewing time has not been easy i may brew up a "twin brew" this weekend maybe some sorta weird double malt double hop creation that could make .. no sense at all

Maybe i'll make a Double IPA and call it a Twin IPA

A1337sti said:

Good thing to do. Would using a garden hose filter be "just as good" as store bought distilled ? or no?

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I don't have experience using a garden hose filter, but I don't imagine that it would be comparable. Distilled water has, theoretically, zero mineral content and a fairly neutral pH. Water that has been, say, carbon filtered retains certain trace minerals and ions such as fluoride, and often carbon filtration doesn't do a very good job of removing chloramines.

So, basically, I think that if you want to run this brewing water experiment, your best bet is to just pay the couple extra bucks for packaged distilled water. That way, you know with absolute certainty whether or not your water was causing the issue. If you use the same water source as before, but run through a filter, your experiment is being performed upon the filter, not the water directly. (i.e. if the filter does not remove whatever is causing the issue, you are no closer to knowing how to move forward; you only know that filtering your water did nothing. You still don't know if the water is the problem, or something else.)

Gotcha! I'll brew with distilled and see what I get. If that's fine then I'll try a filter and see how that compares/ see if any off flavor comes back.

Do I need to worry about brewing salts if I'm doing a full grain (BIAB) ? Probably a super basic 7% ipa northwest pale malt with maybe something red (Carared maybe). One big hop (Chinook?) And some williamete I've had froze since last September

Well maybe I'll skip those since maybe they could be the issue as well. Some are a little yellow/brown .. They smell fine and seem to taste okay. Guess a sample hop tea could be in order too.

If you use distilled or RO water you need to add minerals or salts, that alone can create it's own issues if you dont add the correct amount. I would use some sort of spring water so you dont have to worry about adding stuff to your water.

WLP007 is an english yeast and those are more estery/fruity then something like WLP001. If your yeast was not very fresh you most likely under pitched and being at the top of the recommended temp you most likely had stressed out yeast. You should do an appropriate size starter on your next batch or use a maybe just use dry yeast to help simplify things.

As others had said doing a blonde or something lighter and less hoppy will help identify faults.

I had a recent "off smell with flavor" that went away after a vigorous repour... I took it down to my LHBS and they pointed out it was sulfur.

So spring and not distilled? =\ confusion... What does Walmart sell at their water fill up?

Scratch that.. Primo water fill stations are distilled water with minerals added ! Sounds like exactly what I need. Perfecto

And I'm at the hospital with my new twin new borns. So I've got the whole next month off to brew beer.. Er well take care of my kids;-)

But i should get a batch done too.

A1337sti said:

So spring and not distilled? =\ confusion... What does Walmart sell at their water fill up?

Scratch that.. Primo water fill stations are distilled water with minerals added ! Sounds like exactly what I need. Perfecto

And I'm at the hospital with my new twin new borns. So I've got the whole next month off to brew beer.. Er well take care of my kids;-)

But i should get a batch done too.

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Congrats. I have twins, 18 months enjoy

You want the distilled water no minerals added so you can create your own profile. Usually you can go to the bottled water section and pick up gallons for $1ish.

I just bought a RO+DI system that hooks up to your garden hose outlet for $67. I've spent at least that amount on bottled RO water already... might be worth considering.

A1337sti said:

So spring and not distilled? =\ confusion... What does Walmart sell at their water fill up?

Scratch that.. Primo water fill stations are distilled water with minerals added ! Sounds like exactly what I need. Perfecto

And I'm at the hospital with my new twin new borns. So I've got the whole next month off to brew beer.. Er well take care of my kids;-)

But i should get a batch done too.

Click to expand...

My suggestion is to just used straight distilled, and if you're doing all grain, add 1 tsp calcium chloride (or a scant tsp of gypsum) to the mash. This is strictly for calcium content, which is needed for the mash. That will suffice for your experiment. You are trying to perform a controlled test of your brewing water at the moment, so there's no need to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of the mineral profile. Understand that there's a difference between adding a small amount of minerals to get the requisite calcium content (this is the one you want to do for the moment to keep your experiment straightforward and uncomplicated) and building a mineral profile for pH- and flavor-oriented goals. You can get into the latter after you've sorted out your more immediate concern.

If you prefer to use store-bought spring water, you will be able to perform the same experiment in the same way. The only reason I'd recommend distilled is that bottled spring water is likely to have a much higher pH to start with (for example, I have a bottle of "Icelandic Spring Water" in my car that says right on the label, "pH 8.8"), which is just more of a PITA to deal with if you're trying to keep it simple.

Congrats on the little ones!

Have any "twin ipa" recipes? Hehehe sort of like a double but renamed

So i was all set to get distilled water , and drank 1 last beer and it tasted much better. took it into the LHBS and everyone there liked the beer .

and i did some taste testing of my water source and the RV hose leaves a hose taste.

i went ahead and just got an RV hose filter , cheapy for $10 and did a water taste test , hose, filtered hose and sink. the filtered hose water was not discernible from the tap so i went ahead and just brewed with filtered hose .

I am taste testing that very batch and tastes GREAT i'm very happy with this 2nd batch (although the gravity is only down to a 1.020 ) but at least the flavor is there

thanks for the advice.

I may still do a distilled taste test at some point.

A1337sti said:

So i was all set to get distilled water , and drank 1 last beer and it tasted much better. took it into the LHBS and everyone there liked the beer .

and i did some taste testing of my water source and the RV hose leaves a hose taste.

i went ahead and just got an RV hose filter , cheapy for $10 and did a water taste test , hose, filtered hose and sink. the filtered hose water was not discernible from the tap so i went ahead and just brewed with filtered hose .

I am taste testing that very batch and tastes GREAT i'm very happy with this 2nd batch (although the gravity is only down to a 1.020 ) but at least the flavor is there

thanks for the advice.

I may still do a distilled taste test at some point.

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Glad you found a solution! Hopefully no problems arise after carbonation -- that's most often when I see those pesky off-flavors come out. I really hope that the filter fixed the problem!

Really weird how a beer can taste great coming out of primary but end up with off flavors after carbination..

hopefully that doesn't happen this time around.