Going crazy with this medicinal taste

[tolkheleknar]

Let me regale you with a brewing story and then we'll get to the questions:

The brew-girlfriend and I have approximately 15 batches under our belts in almost a year of brewing and we've noticed an absolutely inescapably terrible defect in about five of them thus far: The dreaded taste of BAND-AIDS. (Three are still fermenting, so that's half of the beer we brewed being undrinkable! FSCK!)

Here are the data that I have relevant to the situation:

First, brewing and fermentation time-frame: The beers we've brewed that have not been subject to the defect have all been dark or big; our first barleywine is coming around nicely in the bottle and the first stout and brown ale we brewed did not seem to exhibit the defect. The first two were brewed April-May last year and the brown ale was brewed in July.

The beer that has shown the problem was largely brewed and fermented over the Summer and Fall. It's been unseasonably warm pretty much since June here in Maryland so keep that in mind once we reach the end.

Second, brewing and fermentation set-up and control: Until literally the last batch we brewed, we've been doing what I'm going to call "mostly grain." Basically, we mashed in grain a la an AG setup and used DME to boost gravity, and in some cases, color. We had been using unmodified tap water* until recently, and we used no temperature control on our fermentation vessels other than putting them in the basement during the Summer months (which did s*** all, really, the house is a pain in the wallet to cool.)

Third, errata: The flavor only really seems to become apparent after the beer has been bottled. At first I thought it had just been some incidental suck back from Iodophor-sanitized airlock water when we had attempted to keep the fermenting beer cool by immersing it in a water bath, but it has consistently appeared in every batch since that one (this was a batch made in June).

*Here are some relevant numbers from our tap analysis for people who might know what levels are acceptable/unacceptable:
Alkalinity: 33 to 81 mg/l
Hardness: 59 to 130 mg/l
pH: 7.4
Calcium: 15.7 to 36.3 mg/l
Magnesium: 4.9 to 10.1 mg/l
Sodium: 15.3 to 27.2 mg/l
Sulfate: 6.8 to 41.9 mg/l
Chloride: 35.4 to 48.8 mg/l
Residual Chlorine: 1.9 to 1.7 mg/l
Haloacetic: Acids 20.8 to 16.9 ug/l
Trihalomethanes: 19.5 to 15.8 ug/l

It would be super great if someone who knows more about what numbers are acceptable could inform me (especially the chloride/chlorine), it would be greatly appreciated.

OK, so here's what I think and here are my questions: The options from what I've read here and elsewhere that give this particular band-aidy defect are that 1) We have a residual low-level infection, particularly being input in the bottling process, 2) Fermentation is typically going too hot, 3) Our water is absolutely terrible for brewing and that the roasty/big flavors of some of the beers we've made have been enough to mask it. My theory is that it's some combination of 2 and 3 leading to the production of these chlorophenols, because we brewed a batch of pale ale in November (i.e. fermented at a more normal range of temps than the Summer beers) that we bottled after the holidays, and it started throwing the flavor about two weeks after bottling (for those of you who are going to say "Don't drink green beer, I've got you covered - The flavor comes out more as the bottles have had longer to sit and plateaus as far as I can tell once they've fully carbed up; the carbonation just brings it out of solution more easily.

My questions are: Has anyone had an experience with such a persistent medicinal off-flavor? Am I totally off-base in my investigations, or am I near the mark as to what our problems are? Any Maryland side DC suburbanite brewers out there who've had similar issues with the tap water around here? What kind of water do the AG brewers recommend using? I've heard de-chlorinated spring water is good, but what brands do you recommend and where do you usually get your water from? We've got a temperature controller on a freezer that we had been using to age beer that is pretty easily convertible into a fermentation chamber, so that is at least one variable that will be eliminated once it warms up (we keep the house between 65-68 F in the Winter and the basement is colder still.)

I figured this could go in any of Fermentation, Bottling, Brew Science, AG, etc. but since I figured it is probably now mainly due to the water chemistry, I'm posting in Brew Science. If that's not quite the right place, I'll track it down after it's been moved.

 

[weirdboy]

It is either chlorine/chloramine or infection.

What are you using to clean and sanitize your equipment? What is the process like? How about when you bottle, what is the procedure you use for that (including all prep/sanitation, racking, etc.)?

Do you taste your beer at every step in the process, or only after you have bottled it?
Does it consistently show up after a couple of weeks in bottles, but not before then?

 

[ajdelange]

Phenols are involved and whether chloramine is as well is debateable. Noteable is that water authorities jack up the chlorination/chloramination in hot weather (though they often, and I believe DC does this) put through an especially big slug in the spring to try to control what goes on in DC's famous wooden pipes. Since you mention that A/C is marginal and also suspect 2) I'd put some money on that. If you haven't removed chloramine (very easy to do - pulverize a Campden table and put 1/4 of the powder into each 5 gallons of water treated) then chlorphenolics are a good possibility.

Lots of folks brew with the local water with good results. Many are moving to RO systems but lots still brew with the basic stuff out of the tap. If you remove chloramine and ferment cooler I'm guessing your problems will be gone but if they are not you can certainly come back and ask again.

There are several brewing clubs in the metro area. Join one of them (or go to a meeting), take your beer and ask the experienced brewers to taste.

 

[mabrungard]

I'm assuming you are avoiding bleach for your sanitation since you mention iodophor water in your air-lock. Bleach shouldn't be used in a brewery, iodophor is good.

You don't mention if you are dechlorinating the tap water. That is a potent contributor to the typical band-aid medicinal flavor that is produced by chlorophenols. I suggest either slowly filtering the tap water through an activated carbon filter canister or adding Campden tablets at a rate of 1 tablet per 20 gal of water. Either of those treatments will remove the disinfection residual that the water company is required to have in the water they pipe to you.

The rest of the water profile looks fine.

Enjoy!

 

[tolkheleknar]

It is either chlorine/chloramine or infection.

What are you using to clean and sanitize your equipment? What is the process like? How about when you bottle, what is the procedure you use for that (including all prep/sanitation, racking, etc.)?

Do you taste your beer at every step in the process, or only after you have bottled it?
Does it consistently show up after a couple of weeks in bottles, but not before then?

We were immersing in the appropriate concentration of iodophor, but we switch to Star-san, because of the aforementioned suck-back problem. We usually make one gallon of the Star-san solution in the bottling bucket, using that to sanitize the auto-siphon, bottling wand, and all attached tubing simultaneously. I pump a bunch of the Star-san through the auto-siphon, pulling the solution all the way to the top, and let it run back into the bucket and circulating several times. We let the spigot on the bottling bucket drain some of the solution out and then tilt and rotate the solution to get the top areas of the bucket. The rest is drained out the spigot and the foam is not rinsed.

Once the bucket has been sufficiently drained sanitation of the racking equipment is done, we crack the fermenter lid (7 gal plastic buckets) for the first time and simply auto-siphon the beer into the bottling bucket, taking care not to contaminate the canes and hoses. The bottles have already been prepared as below, and once enough is in the bottling bucket, we turn the spigot on and bottle. The bottling wand set-up is the wand is attached to the spigot with a very shory piece of clear, flexible plastic tubing like in Revvy's thread here.

As for bottling, we would immerse bottles in solution, dump them, and then cap them with sanitized caps. Last time, I sprayed them with a squirt bottle full of Star san solution, rotated to coat, and then dumped them at the time of bottling.

We taste test the beer at the time of yeast innoculation, bottling, and then every week after bottling until they're carbed up. The flavor showed up at the bottling stage in some of the previous ones, but not the last one we bottled, although we dry hopped the lion's share of these beers (it's showing up most strongly in pales/IPAs,) so at the time of bottling we're taking the beer from secondary to bottling straight off the hops. It's effective at masking a lot of things, and the carbonation helps the aromatic become readily apparent. You can only really taste it if you swish the beer around your mouth and aerate the beer yourself, if it's there at bottling. The noticeability of the flavor increase as the carbonation does, but we haven't had any bottle bombs or visible signs of infection in the bottles.

I'm assuming you are avoiding bleach for your sanitation since you mention iodophor water in your air-lock. Bleach shouldn't be used in a brewery, iodophor is good.

You don't mention if you are dechlorinating the tap water. That is a potent contributor to the typical band-aid medicinal flavor that is produced by chlorophenols. I suggest either slowly filtering the tap water through an activated carbon filter canister or adding Campden tablets at a rate of 1 tablet per 20 gal of water. Either of those treatments will remove the disinfection residual that the water company is required to have in the water they pipe to you.

The rest of the water profile looks fine.

Enjoy!

We used part of a crushed Campden tablet in our most recently brewed beer (two weeks into fermentation), but the brew-girlfriend is allergic to sulfites so I'm looking for potential alternatives in case she reacts as badly to it as she does to the sulfites in wine. I also heard that boiling/leaving out overnight drives out the demons chlorine, so we did that as well on the last two batches of beer brewed.

Edit: Oh man, no strike tags?

 

[weirdboy]

We used part of a crushed Campden tablet in our most recently brewed beer (two weeks into fermentation), but the brew-girlfriend is allergic to sulfites so I'm looking for potential alternatives in case she reacts as badly to it as she does to the sulfites in wine. I also heard that boiling/leaving out overnight drives out the demons chlorine, so we did that as well on the last two batches of beer brewed.

Boiling will drive out the chlorine, but not chloramine. An alternate to campden tablets is ascorbic acid (vitamin C). I use the pure powdered form.

 

[tolkheleknar]

Boiling will drive out the chlorine, but not chloramine. An alternate to campden tablets is ascorbic acid (vitamin C). I use the pure powdered form.

The DC area water companies discontinued the use of chloramine after some controversy or other several years back I believe, and unless there is a lot of ammonia in the drinking water (ew), the chloramine shouldn't be there in the first place, right?

 

[ajdelange]

In wine one uses 1 tablet per gallon. In combating chloramine one uses 1/20th of a tablet per gallon. Plus the bisulfite reacts and becomes sulfate. Any residual either escapes as sulfur dioxide (mash, boil temps) or reduces something in the mash/wort (again being oxidized to sulfate in the process0 so no need to worry about resudual sulfite, But the big question is "Did the campden tablet help?"

The problem with ascorbate is that it is easily reoxidized - not back to the acid but to some other lactone (hazy on this). IOW it's a weaker reducing agent than bisulfite. People do use it for beer sometimes nevertheless. I have no experience with it.

GAC will also remove chloramine though one must insure that the exposure time is sufficient.

 

[ajdelange]

The DC area water companies discontinued the use of chloramine after some controversy or other several years back I believe, and unless there is a lot of ammonia in the drinking water (ew), the chloramine shouldn't be there in the first place, right?

FCWA was moving towards ozonation but last time I visited one of their plants (long time ago) chloramination was the name of the game. Corps of Engineers, I don't know, or the companies they sell to I don't know. Your supplier's website or a call them should tell you.

There is a simple test. Let the water stand over night. If you can still smell chlorine the next morning (while pouring the water back and forth between tumblers) it was chloraminated. If you can't then it was chlorine and obviously standing over night or heating in the HLT should get rid of it.

You can buy an inexpensive test kit from an aquarium supplier but you'll need one that responds to chloramine.

I'm on a well so not up to date on what goes on around here.

 

[tolkheleknar]

FCWA was moving towards ozonation but last time I visited one of their plants (long time ago) chloramination was the name of the game. Corps of Engineers, I don't know, or the companies they sell to I don't know. Your supplier's website or a call them should tell you.

There is a simple test. Let the water stand over night. If you can still smell chlorine the next morning (while pouring the water back and forth between tumblers) it was chloraminated. If you can't then it was chlorine and obviously standing over night or heating in the HLT should get rid of it.

You can buy an inexpensive test kit from an aquarium supplier but you'll need one that responds to chloramine.

I'm on a well so not up to date on what goes on around here.

Thanks for all the info though. I'm glad to hear that the tablets are less of an issue than I thought.

I just cracked into several bottles of four of these brews from the basement and here are my findings:

-They older three sets of bottles are all over-carbonated. There were no gushers, but it would have taken several pours plus waiting to pour any one of the bottles out completely. I know we used too much bottling sugar for the oldest of these three, but the other two we definitely used a more appropriate (but still possibly too large) amount.

-The newest one had an almost cheesy, almost funky flavor to it. Maybe the dry hopping went on for too long? At any rate, it was not palatable. It's been three weeks since bottling, I think, and the carbonation was at a normal level.

-They all had the medicinal taste/aroma in them, but the oldest had it the least. That one was brewed in June, so that probably makes it less likely that it was a fermentation/water effect and more likely that we've got a bug.

I'm going to bring these to the next DC Homebrewers meeting and see what people think. In the meantime...

Welp, I know what I'm buying when I roll on up to the brew store on Sunday. Luckily, we just got several new plastic fermenters in the last two months, and they've had (very strong) new beer in them so they should be OK, I hope.

 

[Kaewan]

Before I had my fermentation chamber readied, I did a few batches that fermented a bit too warm. They had a medicinal taste which I would describe as "band-aid". I did another batch of the same recipe when my fermentation chamber was completed and it did not have that taste. My suggestion is to get your fermentation temperatures in range as soon as you can-- at least to get that part out of the list of potential problems.

 

[tolkheleknar]

Before I had my fermentation chamber readied, I did a few batches that fermented a bit too warm. They had a medicinal taste which I would describe as "band-aid". I did another batch of the same recipe when my fermentation chamber was completed and it did not have that taste. My suggestion is to get your fermentation temperatures in range as soon as you can-- at least to get that part out of the list of potential problems.

That's almost certainly a component to it; the batch that fermented at ambient Winter House temps had the taste less strongly, but it was still there. There was a different, weirder off flavor to it though, and I worry that it got infected somewhere along the line.

 

[-TH-]

One more thing to consider...

Are you sure it is not oxidation? or acetalhyde due to oxidation? or hops + oxygen? (since you mention it is worse with APA/IPA's).

Your story sounds frightenly similar to mine - where I was mistaking oxidation off flavors for phenolic ones and I spent a lot of time barking up the wrong tree. It wasn't until I kept oxygen far away from my beer (particularly the dry-hopped ones) at all times - transfering, bottling, etc. - that my problems went away.

Just a thought

 

[3sheetsEMJ]

Sorry these tips may have been mentioned but its a long post:

1) use gallon sized bottle spring water, generic should be fine. Its pretty cheap and the nutrients are good for yeast. I live in Atlanta and the tap is not the best, lots of chlorine and other nastys, so i dont want to go to great lengths to test the tap whwn i can spend $.69 a gallo amd buy perfectly tastey spring water.

2) i have trouble controlling temp, try using a " swamp cooler", cause like it or not you gotta get that fermentation temp down

3) make sure you are not underpitching your yeast, especially with " big beers", shiuld get 200 billion yeast cells for a 5 gal batch, even more for high alc beers, altho some may disagree

4) have you tested your mazhing pH? Should be around 5.2

Many may dispute what i jave listed, but theyre what i use and i rarely get off flavors.

Good luck!

 

[dazer23866]

Sorry these tips may have been mentioned but its a long post:

1) use gallon sized bottle spring water, generic should be fine. Its pretty cheap and the nutrients are good for yeast. I live in Atlanta and the tap is not the best, lots of chlorine and other nastys, so i dont want to go to great lengths to test the tap whwn i can spend $.69 a gallo amd buy perfectly tastey spring water.

2) i have trouble controlling temp, try using a " swamp cooler", cause like it or not you gotta get that fermentation temp down

3) make sure you are not underpitching your yeast, especially with " big beers", shiuld get 200 billion yeast cells for a 5 gal batch, even more for high alc beers, altho some may disagree

4) have you tested your mazhing pH? Should be around 5.2

Many may dispute what i jave listed, but theyre what i use and i rarely get off flavors.

Good luck!

+1 for this especialy no 3) i had this problem and proper pitching rates sorted this for me

 

[3sheetsEMJ]

Yeah underpitching can cause the yeast to overmultiply and stress creating some weird off flavors in the process. Ive heard different numbers ranging from 100-400 billion yeast cells per 5 gal batch. I typically use 100 but have used 200, to be honest i didnt notice any difference, so i will be using 100 unless i go to a higher alc% beer...

 

[jmf143]

Yeah underpitching can cause the yeast to overmultiply and stress creating some weird off flavors in the process. Ive heard different numbers ranging from 100-400 billion yeast cells per 5 gal batch. I typically use 100 but have used 200, to be honest i didnt notice any difference, so i will be using 100 unless i go to a higher alc% beer...

At 100 billion cells you will be severely underpitching. For ales, you should pitch a minimum of 750k cells per ml of wort per degree Plato. For 5 gallons of 1.050 wort thats about 178 billion cells.

 

[Ibrewaletx]

I think the yeast pitching rates and fermentation temps will help considerably.
While you are in the process of troubleshooting everything, take apart your bottling bucket valve (I see you use the same method of bottling as Revvy, which is great, I just started doing that) and clean that valve as well as you can. Soak it in oxyclean for a night and rinse well as well.
Just my added 2 cents.

 

[mrpontiac66]

I would also suggest that when you clean, if you are using buckets to ferment in that have the valve in them, take apart the valve and clean it and especially the rubber washer. I hadn't done that and noticed an off smell in the area, specifically on the rubber washer which i suspect made it into my batch of beer. it had the phenolic, bandaid aroma and taste. I have since changed to 6.5 gallon glass carboys.