off flavor - medicinal/band-aid - i know chlorine BUT help me solve the puzzle

Hi! I was having a similar problem. What kind of sanitizer have you been using? Is your tap water hard or soft?

I have VERY hard tap water. I was using iodophor as this seemed to work for other people. At bottling, the beer was excellent almost every time. After bottle conditioning (ie a month) the beer wasn't so tasty. Always a weird tartness or plastic kind of taste. I suspected sanitizer and/or water. I moved to distilled water and star san. This change seems to keep the beer the same from carboy to bottling to conditioning.

It can also be the water you use for brewing. Many of my early batches were 100% distilled water and extract and clean/sanitize with one step. I moved to filtered tap water and extract with iodophor. The beer was over all not as good. I was also unhappy after tasting my friends all grain beer and my extract, so I went AG. Plus i went with distilled and tap water for the beer, and distilled for my starsan. My beer seems to be great now.

Long story short, look at your brewing water for hardness and how effective your santizers are.

+1 on the Brett.

I was doing a sensory analysis with an Illinois State Wine Consultant, and he taught me to pick up Brett flavors in a couple of wines that were infected. It was a distinct Band-Aid flavor - but barely perceptible. The wine probably could have been sold as is, and most people wouldn't detect it. However, the Brett would slowly grow in the wine and be much more perceptible in the future.

So anyways, I bottled a week ago with distilled water used in every aspect of cleaning and the boiling sugar etc and star san and so far the beer has turned out absolutely fantastic, its not completely carbonated yet but has not one trace of band aid in it at all. I am pretty excited and will post again an update in another couple weeks just to verify. As of right now though I think I can pretty much say that the hypothesis was correct.

::The chlorine content in the water at boiling is not as important as having chlorine free water for cleaning your bottles and equipment as well as for the bottling sugar water that you boil just prior to bottling!

I know this is a necropost but I'm having the same issue.

I think I have my issue pinned down to oxidation and high storage temps but now I'm wondering about the tap water I use in my sanitizer and priming sugar solution.

My beer always tastes great as we bottle but it seems like as it ages, it gets and increases in the band-aid aroma/taste. Could the chlorine from the two cups of tap water that I use to dissolve my priming sugar in really be the culprit? That seems really hard to believe. What seems even harder to believe is that chlorine in my sanitizer solution is causing it.

uncleben113 said:

I know this is a necropost but I'm having the same issue.

I think I have my issue pinned down to oxidation and high storage temps but now I'm wondering about the tap water I use in my sanitizer and priming sugar solution.

My beer always tastes great as we bottle but it seems like as it ages, it gets and increases in the band-aid aroma/taste. Could the chlorine from the two cups of tap water that I use to dissolve my priming sugar in really be the culprit? That seems really hard to believe. What seems even harder to believe is that chlorine in my sanitizer solution is causing it.

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The taste threshold for chlorophenols is very low, as in parts per billion rather than parts per million, so yes, 2 cups of moderately to heavily chlorinated water plus chlorinated sanitizer solution could be the cause. This is especially true if you use the same water to brew with, since it may contribute some chorophenols, but not enough to taste at bottling, and then the additional chlorine introduced with the priming sugar pushes it past the taste threshold. The chlorophenols from chlorinated water, using PVC hoses, etc. form within a few days of being introduced, so if it get's worse the longer it ages I'd look more towards infection.

uncleben113 said:

I know this is a necropost but I'm having the same issue.

I think I have my issue pinned down to oxidation and high storage temps but now I'm wondering about the tap water I use in my sanitizer and priming sugar solution.

My beer always tastes great as we bottle but it seems like as it ages, it gets and increases in the band-aid aroma/taste. Could the chlorine from the two cups of tap water that I use to dissolve my priming sugar in really be the culprit? That seems really hard to believe. What seems even harder to believe is that chlorine in my sanitizer solution is causing it.

Click to expand...

Oxidation is a tough sell. Unless you are seriously splashing your beer around, I don't think you would see oxidation (wet cardboard, papery) notes. Now high storage temps would accelerate microbe replication.

Band-aids are directly chlorine or infection. I am leaning more towards infection. The quickest way to know is to dispose of everything you use to bottle (bucket, racking cane, cane tubing. You can keep the capper, just sanitize it before putting it on a bottle). Also, start using boiled water with the sugar. You don't need to let it cool, just put it in the bucket while racking. The beer will cool it down. Rather than changing one thing at a time, I find it more effective to start new when dealing with infection. If your primary ferments are okay, then i think your problem is bottling. Good luck!

I'm usually really careful with sanitizing everything but I guess I haven't been great about cleaning. I just got some PBW so I'm going to give everything a good cleaning before I do anything else. I'm also going to ditch some tubing and replace it.

As for oxidation, when transferring my beer from primary to secondary or to bottling bucket, I usually let the tubing drain a few inches from the bottom of the vessel. This usually happens two to three times during the life of each of my beers. I'm going to be more careful from now on but is that enough to cause oxidation?

That little extra beer going in is not a problem. Everyone does it.

Cleaning is as important as sanitation.After trial, error, and a lot of trashing, I think my problem was related to my tap water. I have very hard tap water. Cleaners and sanitizers do not like hard water. It makes their job hard or impossible. I now used distilled water for a lot of cleaning (PBW heated on a stove with DI) and all of my StarSan is DI. I started to notice with hard water that I had a residue in my carboys, so at that point I just had to bite the bullet.

I usually use spring water that I buy from the grocery store to brew with but I never use it for sanitizer water or to dissolve my priming sugar in. I'm starting to think that the water is the culprit.

My last batch I brewed, I said to hell with spring water, I'm using tap water. I was really testing to see if the spring water was making any difference. So last night I popped one of the beers from that batch open after 3 weeks of bottle conditioning and what did I taste and smell? Bandaids right up front!

What I don't understand is why didn't it taste like that when I bottled it? It tasted great when I bottled it, as do all of my others. But this one didn't take time to develop that flavor like another one of them did. So maybe it is an infection... I don't know

A know its been a while since I posted on here. But a big change I made that solved the Band-aid problem was I started Kegging! I haven't had one beer turn out with bandaid flavor since I switched. I think that the Chlorine and Infection rates play into this.

1. Chlorine: when I bottled, water is used for everything, each bottle is washed and sanitized.
2. Infection: I never felt a total peace about the sanitation of my bottles. With a keg, I can deliberately spend time cleaning the one or two containers because they affect the whole batch. It makes me feel better than worrying about 50-100 bottles.
2.a: Many times when I used to bottle my beer tasted decent @ bottling, really there were no off flavors at all. The off-flavors would produce in the bottles. With kegging, once fermentation is complete, I have so much less worry because I throw the kegs in my kegerator where it sits at really low temperatures. Changing from bottling to kegging has to be the best brewing decision I made. All of my beers except one turned out fantastic. The one that didn't soured, but for God's sake, it wasn't band-aids.

I know this isn't the best answer, but I do understand the frustration of losing all of the hard work with crappy beer. For me, it was worth the $$ to switch.

I had the same problem with all of my brown ales. It was strange because everything tasted great until I keged each batch. Once I forced carbonated I had the same taste. I have switched to starsan instead of iodine based sanitizer and it seemed to delay when the band-aid taste would be present. I'm starting to think its my keg even though I have taken it apart and cleaned the snot out of it before. Is this similar story to anyone else?

For those that want to continue bottling, have you thought about baking your bottles instead of using a liquid solution?