sour taste in a muntons cerveza brew kit?

My friend and i went to buy ingredients for a IPA at a local brewshop and found a muntons mexican cerveza brew kit for 7 bucks. So we got it to see what a brew kit like this is like. ive never done a kit like this. after about a week and a half i tasted it and found that it has a sour fruty flavor, not exactly bad but still its very diffrent from what i had expected for a cerveza like brew. will this flavor go away eventually or will it keep the sour flavor? its still bubbling slightly so the yeast is not completely done yet. instead of the yeast that was in the kit we used a safale 05-s yeast. any thoughts or pointers on this?

maybe they intentionally make it taste skunky so it can be just like real Corona But really, I bet the kit was old and that's why it was on sale. Old extract gives all sorts of bad flavors and aromas.

Yes it was an old kit. I had no clue that time can change the malt this much. Im thinking about bottling it anyways and trying it about 3 weeks down the line. maybe it will taste like a nice sour beer. Not likely though. its all trial and error. deffinitly learned from this cheap experiment. cheers

The typical Mexican beer is a lager, so if you ferment it warm with an ale yeast like US-05, it isn't going to taste anything like a Mexican cerveza. This isn't to say that the included yeast was likely a lager yeast...for a kit like that it's just as likely that it wasn't, but maybe the result would be closer to a lager than US-05. Making lagers also requires cooler fermentation and storing for longer periods of time.

The sourness could be caused by the fact that it's a "kit and kilo" recipe. Half of your fermentables are pure sugar instead of malt extract, which invariably leads to cidery green apple flavors. For better results you should substitute light dried malt extract for the sugar.

Although it is still an extract brew, good find for $7 by the way, a critical step in your brewing process is cooling your wart from boiling to the yeasts pitch temp. This is when the beer is most prone to infection and bacteria. Some people simply "top off" their 2.5 gallons of wart with tap water... this is bad. Always boil your waters. Others take too long to chill their wart and bacteria will infest the wart, but will soon die off after becoming alcoholic, leaving a very undesirable smell. So remember, always boil all water used and chill as rapidly and cleanly as possible!

P.S. Next time you purchase an expired or almost expired kit, double check the expiration date on the yeast. And always rehydrate your dried yeast.

TheHomebrewConnection

Geobrewer85 said:

Im thinking about bottling it anyways and trying it about 3 weeks down the line.

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You definitely should. Never dump a batch no matter how bad it may seem. You never know what a little time will do for it. It probably won't be that great, but it will probably be drinkable. The only time I would ever dump a batch would be if there was an obvious infection or rancid odor.

ok thanks. the odor of the beer is sweet, not bad at all. it just has a wierd sour cherry taste to it. i cooled it down as fast as i could with a cold water bath in the sink like all my beer. ill definitly let you know how it turns out in about 3 weeks. thanks for everything! cheers

What other fermentable did you use? Some of the Muntons are pretty decent if you use 3 lbs of Dried malt with them.