I'm losing my mind over this

Yeah I doubt the under sink filter is getting all the chloramine.

 

Who said anything about an under the sink filter?

 

after reading through all this, and if you were me, the first thing i would change would be my yeast. building up from tiny amounts does introduce a reasonable possibility of contamination. you could easily eliminate this possibility by brewing a basic pale with a rehydrated sachet of s-05.

the next thing would be replacing all plastic components. i can think of a couple times in the past where people have made similar posts and the issue was resolved with a new fermentation bucket.

 

You said you use a filter for chlorine in post #22. I threw chloramines out there to see your reaction. Since you don't dispute they are in your water let's assume they are. I don't believe you can simply filter them out.

 

If it's the yeast, why does the beer taste fine out of the fermenter, but bad after 3-4 days in the keg?

I have about 5 buckets, a better bottle, and a glass carboy.

But I will buy a new autosiphon.

The RO water is use is also carbon filtered, which DOES remove all the chlorine and chloramines.

Also - if it's chlorine in the water, why does the beer taste fine out of the fermenter yadda yadda

 

I think this has been argued enough at this point. I go back to my previous post and say, bottle the next batch. That will clearly define if its ingredients/water/process or if it's keg/gas/etc.

It's easy for us to give suggestions but the op seems like they have thought of all of this and ruled it out. Now, it's possible there is an oversight on op's behalf, but I think its obvious that a lot of variables can be eliminated and the possible solutions narrowed by simply bottling a batch. Keep us posted...frustrated for you.

 

Whenever I use oxi-clean I always use warm water to get it to dissolve better and then just rinse a few times. I had read somewhere a while back (and I can't source this) that after using oxi-clean (sodium percarbonate) it was important to neutralize it with an acid. StarSan is an acid based cleaner so I always dump a gallon or so in my kegs and give it a good mix. I dump that out rinse one more time and sanitize again. Never had any problems so I just keep doing it. Good Luck!

 

If it's definitely NOT all the things you're saying it's "definitely not" OP, then it's you.

Sorry, it can't NOT be every single potential thing that people mentioned. Do you want to get it fixed or not? It's time to open your mind to what it MIGHT be instead of what you're absolutely certain it's NOT.

You have given us zero description of your carbing process...it's force carbed, we know that, but do you set and forget? What's your storage/serving temp? Are you shaking it?

It's either your kegs or carbonic bite is my guess, but you've already said you're certain it's NOT those things...so I guess you're on your own.

 

My experience with contaminated yeast has been that the intended strain dominates and gives the expected flavor profile initially, but then, with time, the character from the contaminate strain starts coming through. This might happen whether the contamination is in the yeast itself or coming from the bucket.

Then again, a lot of this action I'm talking about would be greatly retarded at fridge temperatures.

Not a perfect answer, but I think it is worth considering.

 

I've got to agree with others here and say bottle a batch and see what happens.
You said yourself it tastes great right out of the fermentation vessel. So logically it has to be something after (or during) transfer to the keg. Confirm this by bottling, and then if the taste doesn't show up, you know its your kegging gear and you have a lot fewer variable to consider.

 

FWIW - the undersides (inside the keg) of the in/out posts tend to be under cleaned and/or under sanitized. Those little nooks and crannies are hard to clean thoroughly. It's even harder to remember to clean them. You may be harboring a stinky critter in there.

 

If your getting your co2 from a welding store MAKE sure its not a blended argon/ co2 mix. I would change your co2 gas bottle out at a different source and see if that helps. How are you cleaning your kegs " pbw or ??" How are you sanitizing your kegs " star san or ??. Why the addition of so many brewing salts. I would brew a batch with the local tap water, run it through a in line water filter and a RV hose so no "rubber hose" off flavors will be added. Both can be picked up at a local rv dealer or walmart. What this does is give you a baseline as to were to start with the addition of brewing salts if any are needed. Where I live ( Northern Az) I have never added anything to my water and have been brewing for 5 years with no issues and making great beers. Obviously water is different everywhere. Try it and see if that's the case.

 

If your getting your co2 from a welding store MAKE sure its not a blended argon/ co2 mix. I would change your co2 gas bottle out at a different source and see if that helps. How are you cleaning your kegs " pbw or ??" How are you sanitizing your kegs " star san or ??. Why the addition of so many brewing salts. I would brew a batch with the local tap water, run it through a in line water filter and a RV hose so no "rubber hose" off flavors will be added. Both can be picked up at a local rv dealer or walmart. What this does is give you a baseline as to were to start with the addition of brewing salts if any are needed. Where I live ( Northern Az) I have never added anything to my water and have been brewing for 5 years with no issues and making great beers. Obviously water is different everywhere. Try it and see if that's the case.

 

What about your CO2 manifold (if you have one) or regulator? I have seen beer over carb or lines get reversed/clogged which caused beer to force it's way back up into a manifold and regulator that caused all kinds of funky problems in kegs.

 

I did say that I was going to bottle the next batch.

This was one of the reasons I started the thread - obviously, I was overlooking something. Some suggestions are plausible but others are not. I won't waste my time with the more absurd suggestions.

No shaking. I only have a single regulator, so I have to carb and serve on the same equipment. While a beer is carbonating, I set it at about 25 psi. If I have a keg that's already carbonated, I'll turn the valve off at the manifold for that keg before cranking up the pressure. I'll check it a couple of times while it's carbing, and when it's done it doesn't see any pressure over 12 psi, which is what I serve at.

The keezer is set at about 42*.

I never said I was certain it's not the kegs. About the only thing that's left is the keg sanitation. I already said I was going to use PBW and hot water going forward, so I don't get the "you're on your own" attitude.

Ok, now you're on to something. Every batch I've made with a starter has turned on me. I've made two batches out of the last ten with re-hydrated yeast and those are the only two that have been drinkable.

So I need to look at my yeast practices I guess. I slant and follow the guide in the "yeast slanting" thread, so I'm not sure where I'm going wrong.

I will bottle the next batch.

I saw an interesting technique for cleaning kegs on youtube. Fill the keg halfway with cleaner, and then put a homer bucket upside down over the top. Flip both bucket and keg over, and the entire top half of the keg gets cleaned.

Even if it's not keg sanitation, I'm going to start soaking them this way from now on.

The first bottle I got from a LHBS. Subsequent refills have been at one of two welding shops, one more than the other. The less-often used welding shop gave me a cylinder that was contaminated. It made the beer taste REALLY bad, and I could even smell the taint coming right out of the CO2 bottle. The other one I'm pretty sure is pure CO2. I've had conversations with the guy about brewing, and he deals extensively with breweries and wineries so I would have to assume he's not selling me something that will ruin beer. But it is worth checking.

I tried brewing beer with tap water. Dark beers came out fine, but anything lighter than a dark amber ale did not taste right at all. That's why I started researching water chemistry.

I did have a backup once. I cleaned the regulator but not the manifold. Another idea worth a shot, thank you.

 

While you might consider some suggestions unlikely given what you know, calling other people's well-intentioned free advice "absurd" might be a bit offensive to those who are trying to help you.

If you've had drinkable beer with rehydrated yeast and bad beer with slanted yeast, maybe something went wrong with your last batch of slants and you've been using infected yeast the whole time. And if you're reslanting from a bad batch, it's not gonna get any better until you start again from step one.

Why not try getting a bottle from the LHBS again just to be sure? Even if it may be unlikely that your CO2 source is the issue, it wouldn't hurt to eliminate one variable.

You keep mentioning that the beer tastes good out of the fermenter and bad out of the keg. Aside from questioning your keg and CO2, have you considered that the bad flavors might be present the whole time, but only become apparent when carbonated? My last batch tasted good out of the fermenter but has some undesirable flavors that came on strong with the carbonation.

One final long shot:

Is it possible that your temperature control is broken or poorly-calibrated so you're actually fermenting at higher temperatures than you intend?

Best of luck. If all else fails, open a bakery and make copious amounts of beer bread!

 

Oxiclean aint the problem. I used nothing but sodium petcarbonate to clean and sanitize for 7 years. And i dont rinse for 8 min either.

To whoever was alleging its not food dafe. Its usef to clean tripe do yes it is.

Cloromine cant be filterd with a simple carbon filter nor will it boil off. You can get rid of it with campden tablets or a really expensive filter.

OP maybe i missed it but how much iron is in your water?

Co2 isnt very reactive but carbonic acid is. Mettalic taste WILL be more pronounced once carbonated.

 

This stands out to me. These 2 batches were kegged in the same kegs where you've been finding the off flavors and carbonated with the same CO2 source?

 

I cant believe this thread is still going.

 

I use a glacier water vending machine. I don't know how effective they are at purifying water.

I would assume close to zero, but I guess the only way to know is to send a sample of the purified water off to ward labs.

Just for kicks, I put a couple gallons of purified water into a keg and carbonated it. It did not pick up the taste at all. Whatever it is, it's specific to beer.

Yes, identical process. As soon as I went back and looked at my logs, I realized there has to be a connection. It would suck to have to throw out my yeast library though.

I've taken it to a LHBS and a brewpub/LHBS. They said they liked it and didn't taste anything wrong.

Without knowing what it tastes like, I can't be sure. But I didn't pick it up in the carbonated water.

Copper immersion chiller. No starsan, I just put it in the kettle with about 15 minutes left in the boil.

 

I "cant" believe you're still reading it.

 

This is a huge stretch I know, but is there any chance that the off flavor is coming from the glasses your dispensing the beer into? I'd assume you took a growler or bottle to the guys a the lhbs when they said it tasted fine, so maybe there's some residue or something from a dishwasher?

 

I could take a clean glass out of the cupboard, and thoroughly hand wash it until it sparkled. It wouldn't help.

 

Perhaps you mentioned doing this earlier, if so I apologize for missing it, but have you completely disassembled your disconnects and cleaned them? I recall an eerily similar thread on here a while back where the poster had great beer going into the kegs every time, but they then became contaminated within a short time after being tapped. Turned out there was some nastiness living in his gas disconnect. After he cleaned or replaced it (I can't remember which), the problem disappeared.

 

Pour off about 6 or 8 Oz from the keg into a glass. Let it get flat for about 30 minutes, swirl it etc. Pour off a fresh sample. Compare the two.

If the taste is not there in the original sample then you know it's the carbonation.

 

I actually did that last night. I tore apart everything on the gas side from the regulator (which I already cleaned) to the kegs. I soaked everything in PBW + hot water, ran a brush through the QD bodies and rinsed thoroughly. I also disassembled the manifold and cleaned it before putting it all back together.

So that should rule that out, hopefully.

I actually took a keg out of the keezer and let it warm up. A couple times a day, I shake it and vent the pressure. It's about flat now and I'm going to hook it back up to see if the flavor changed at all.

Also:

Instead of bottling, I decided to naturally carbonate a batch in the keg. I kegged a chocolate porter today - into a THOROUGHLY cleaned and sanitized keg. This will at least rule out everything that touches the keezer. If this doesn't come out right, I will bottle the next batch.

God I hate bottling lol

 

Why wouldn't you just bottle right away... The only thing you are eliminating are the tap lines and carbonation which are easy to isolate already.

 

Are you uncsrewing the QD's at the top and taking them apart to clean? The first time I did that was after a year or so of kegging, not realizing they actually came apart like that. I was horrified at the gunk.

 

One thing that I noticed with my system is if I force carbed, and it wasn't carbed enough, and I cranked the pressure back up, I got carbonic bite. Now I just put it to 30 psi, leave it for 3 days and the put it on the serving psi. Works good for American ales around 2.4 volumes.

 

Yep, I completely took them apart. There are five pieces total, including the o-ring.

It spends about the same total amount of time carbing, but they sometimes sit at 12 psi or so for a few hours while I'm serving out of the other kegs. I would really like to get a separate chest freezer and CO2 tank so I can carbonate separately, but I'm already up to two chest freezers and SWMBO is going to draw the line somewhere, especially if I continue to make crappy beer.

 

IMO, you have an infection problem related to your yeast. You state you've had drinkable batches when using dry yeast but continual metallic tastes when building up from slants.

Infections don't always win the battle but they always win the war. Those bacteria will keep working after the yeast are finished.

Also, many off flavors (or flavors in general) taste much different flat than carbonated. Just taste a beer bulk aged but flat compared to the same beer carbonated. It's a world of difference.

 

Could also be that the recipes aren't that good? Since they've all been implicated, it's tough to rule this out.

 

Yeah that's kind of why I started the thread.

But I agree that it points towards a problem with the slants.

It's easy to rule it out because I brew clones, proven HBT recipes (like Oktoberfast), and stuff I make up on brew day. It happens to all of them.

 

So all the batches that are bad had one yeast source and the only batches that were good had another yeast source?

Yeah, lets do another 75 posts worth of "absurd" advice.

 

Actually I found two batches in my other notebook that used yeast from slants and tasted normal.

 

Until you make a beer with new yeast, the yeast can't be ruled out. My understanding of yeast slants are that each vile is its own little world. You might have avoided something bad in 2 of the yeast viles, but it wound up in the rest. Without tearing apart the entire process again and again, I would buy fresh yeast and brew a new batch.

 

Wrong thread

 

My homebrewer friend came over (he's been brewing since 1991), and he said it tastes like the beginning of an infection. He said it seemed much more likely to be a keg sanitation issue than infected slants, because the beer tastes fine out of the fermenter. He said that the cold water and oxyclean was probably not going to get all of the critters out of the corners.

The batch I just kegged I cleaned with hot water and PBW, so if he's right and it's not the slants, this batch should taste fine.

I guess I'll wait a couple of weeks to find out.

 

Besides the quick disconnects, have you taken off the posts and dip tubes and cleaned the seals?