homebrewflyfish
Active Member
Today I was bottling and I baked the bottles in the oven. When I went to bottle, the bottles had a terrible smell in them. I can't really describe it...just really bad...maybe a sulphery and burnt chemicals are good descriptors. The thing is I've done this many times before and never had this problem.
Here's exactly what I did...
Rinsed my bottles with a jet rinser. Shook out as much water as I could, but they weren't dry inside. Put foil on top. Stacked them in the oven. Baked 350 for about 2 hours. Let them cool in the oven. Then right before bottling took the foil off and bam...a nasty, nasty smell.
I actually ended up pulling out as many previously sterilized bottles as I could find and used those. The smell was so bad I was afraid it would ruin all the work and time spent waiting for my saison to dry out.
Given that I've never had this problem and Palmer recommends the method I'm trying to figure out what went wrong. All the bottles were clean as I'm very careful to rinse them right away, but I did NOT use a soaking cleanser.
I searched the forums and only found one post about this. A few of the possible thoughts from there...
-Too hot, too long (what would this matter for the bottles?)
-Foil in the oven for that long creates an issue (Is this true?)
-Wet bottles creates an issue (something in the NYC water?)
Anybody have any thoughts on this? Why would there be such a bad smell? Maybe it's fumes from the water evaporating that had no place to go? The foil as the culprit seems odd given that it's frequently used in ovens. Do you think the smell will affect the beer?
I know I can try leaving the foil off until after or just use Starsan/Iodophor, and I'll try that next time. (I know, I know I should just keg, but I don't have space in my small NYC apartment ;-)
Rather than alternative methods, I'm really looking to get to the root of this problem to understand why exactly it happened. What is this nasty smell from and why it's happening?
Any thoughts?
Thanks very much for your help.
Here's exactly what I did...
Rinsed my bottles with a jet rinser. Shook out as much water as I could, but they weren't dry inside. Put foil on top. Stacked them in the oven. Baked 350 for about 2 hours. Let them cool in the oven. Then right before bottling took the foil off and bam...a nasty, nasty smell.
I actually ended up pulling out as many previously sterilized bottles as I could find and used those. The smell was so bad I was afraid it would ruin all the work and time spent waiting for my saison to dry out.
Given that I've never had this problem and Palmer recommends the method I'm trying to figure out what went wrong. All the bottles were clean as I'm very careful to rinse them right away, but I did NOT use a soaking cleanser.
I searched the forums and only found one post about this. A few of the possible thoughts from there...
-Too hot, too long (what would this matter for the bottles?)
-Foil in the oven for that long creates an issue (Is this true?)
-Wet bottles creates an issue (something in the NYC water?)
Anybody have any thoughts on this? Why would there be such a bad smell? Maybe it's fumes from the water evaporating that had no place to go? The foil as the culprit seems odd given that it's frequently used in ovens. Do you think the smell will affect the beer?
I know I can try leaving the foil off until after or just use Starsan/Iodophor, and I'll try that next time. (I know, I know I should just keg, but I don't have space in my small NYC apartment ;-)
Rather than alternative methods, I'm really looking to get to the root of this problem to understand why exactly it happened. What is this nasty smell from and why it's happening?
Any thoughts?
Thanks very much for your help.