Yeasty smell of kegged batch

I brewed this recipe on 8/29:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/fat-tire-clone-6048/#post56233

I ended up with about 9 gallons which was split roughly 50/50 between two carboys. One carboy received Nottingham dry yeast, one received Safale US-05.

After about two weeks in the primary, I moved both carboys from my old house to my new house and then let them both sit for a week before I cold crashed them overnight and kegged on 9/20.

Brix into carboys: 13.6 (OG 1.056)
Brix into kegs: 5.9 (FG 1.004)

I got the same 5.9 brix reading from both carboys. Seems way too low.

The beer tastes decent, especially now that about ten pints has been pulled from each keg. However, it smells like the nasty yeast sludge at the bottom of a just-drained carboy that's been left out overnight. And the smell is not lessening with each additional pint. If I don't smell it as I take a drink, I can enjoy it, but as soon as I catch a whiff, I gotta dump the rest of the glass down the drain.

What might have gone wrong? My only thought is that transporting the fermenters stirred up the yeast cake and ended up tainting the beer with whatever nastiness was buried in there.

Is this at all salvageable? Could I transfer it back into a fermenter, add a bit of fresh yeast, and give it a couple of weeks to try and work itself out? Or should I just dump the kegs?

if the gravity is indeed that low you can't add any more yeast it will have no sugars to feed on.

There was a bad batch of Nottingham recently recalled... I think if you search it you may be able to find out if it was indeed yours.

What's the FG? not the brix reading (since alcohol skews the reading, a refractometer isn't useful for FG) but the actual hydrometer reading? I'm sure it's higher than 1.004.

Anyway, that's probably not an issue anyway. "Bad yeasty taste" makes me think of autolysis. But with only two weeks in the primary, that's not very likely.

Could it be the lines of your kegerator? Especially since both kegs, which used different yeast strains, have the odor.

Bowtiebrewery said:

There was a bad batch of Nottingham recently recalled... I think if you search it you may be able to find out if it was indeed yours.

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Well, the half that I fermented with Safale US-05 is equally bad. So it can't be that.

Yooper_Brew said:

What's the FG? not the brix reading (since alcohol skews the reading, a refractometer isn't useful for FG) but the actual hydrometer reading? I'm sure it's higher than 1.004.

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My hydrometer is broken; I suppose this gives me a reason to finally replace it. I used this calculator to convert the brix readings to OG/FG:

http://www.onebeer.net/refractometer.shtml

Anyway, that's probably not an issue anyway. "Bad yeasty taste" makes me think of autolysis. But with only two weeks in the primary, that's not very likely.

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Could high temperatures be a factor? It got up to the upper 70's for a day or two in the house during the week before I cold crashed and kegged the beer. This was after stirring up the fermenters by transporting them from my old place to my current one.

Could it be the lines of your kegerator? Especially since both kegs, which used different yeast strains, have the odor.

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I use a picnic tap and swap it between kegs. It gets cleaned and sanitized every week or two.

I have the same problem sometimes with safale and wyeast 1007. After enough pulls it goes away. Often the odor is just in the first pull of a session. Maybe it just takes awhile for all the yeast to finally settle out and compact. When it's warm out, it's not much of a problem since I always need to dump a couple ounces of the first pour out. My keezer is in the garage and when the beer hits that warm tap, hello foam monster.

I checked on both of the kegs tonight. They'd been in the fridge undisturbed for a few days. We've mostly been sampling the Safale keg, which has about 3 gallons left, and the Nottingham keg is still almost full. I pulled and dumped about half a pint from each keg before tasting. I also pulled another cup or two and tasted it again to see if it was changing as the bottom layer of beer was drawn off.

The Safale-fermented beer still smells yeasty when you put your nose to the glass. Fairly unpleasant. When drinking it, the yeast is barely detectable, and the chocolate malt comes through very strongly. The taste is about the same as before, but the smell hasn't gotten any better. Also, there are still solid chunks of sediment that are making it into the glass even this far through the keg.

The Nottingham keg, on the other hand, actually seems to have improved. The smell is much more subdued, and I think it tastes noticeably better than the Safale keg. Very clear, too, with little or no sediment making its way into the glass.