Wort is good, beer is bad. Troubleshooting needed.

Hey Judochop. Do you have an update on your friend's beer situation? I have a problem that sounds EXACTLY the same as yours. I naturally carbonate (or at least have been for my past two beers) and have had delicious first pours. Two days later, the malt and hop character is extremely subdued and replaced with a sharp bitter and almost sour flavor. The taste is much more pronounced in beers I force carbonated, but since priming with sugar, the taste only comes after tapping.

I'd love to know if your friend's beer is on par with yours after swapping his tank. It would definitely be enough to convince me to gas out my tank and get a fill!

 

Yes, all signs point to the tank as the problem. We figure some welder got his hands on it at one point, used up all the pressure, then somehow leaked some engine grease (or something) back into the cylinder, and that has permanently fouled the tank. I don't think draining the tank and refilling would resolve the issue, and we're not going to try to find out.

It does sound to me like you might be running into the same thing. How you describe the instant deterioration of taste/flavor matches how I would describe what I tasted in his ruined beers. In some cases he'd force carb with a clean tank, then put the keg on tap, and it'd taste fine. But since he was dispensing with the bad tank, the beer would slowly devolve into flabby, sour, rotten crap.

Get a new tank and see if that fixes your problem. If it ends up being something else, well, it's always a good idea to have an extra tank anyway.

Good luck! (And sorry for the very late response. Hopefully the problem is already solved.)