beer gone bad question

[hopbrad]

ive brewed about 7-8 batches. my 2nd batch i brewed at the end of Feb and bottled the end of March, ive left some sit around to age. and they werent good at all. they had a band-aid type flavor. to give more info, it was the brewers best Alt-Bier. I drank my first bottle after about 6-7 weeks in the bottle. it was decent. Probably my least favorite of all my brews to present date. but, it did get a little better as the weeks/months went on and no bad off flavors...but still, my least favorite homebrew. i cracked a few open this past week and 2 of the 3 had a very bad taste to it. a very rubbery, band aid taste. then i opened up another tonite, same thing. until this past week, none of the 40-50 beers that i drank from the batch had that band-aid flavor, so im wondering if this style doesnt age well? or if it is an infection that slowly crept up or what...would like to hear feedback. I've yet to brew a beer that needs serious aging, but was going to do a belgium dark strong sorta based off of chimay blue / dogfishhead raison d'etre, and have heard i should let them bottle age for a few months. feedback would be great on my problem with the altbeer and if i should age the belgium for 5-6 months

 

[weirdboy]

Almost assuredly an infection. That band-aid flavor can also be caused by chlorine or chloramine in your water and/or poor yeast health during fermentation, but you would very likely have noticed it long before now if that were the case.


There is nothing inherently wrong with aging beer...you certainly shouldn't be developing a band-aid flavor just from doing so.

 

[iambeer]

There's a myth that if you hold on to shwag beer long enough, the blue fairy will come and make it delicious.... Well, maybe a little better. I wouldn't expect real magic though.

Aging beer should mean that the beer is good to start with. If it's not good, then do you really want to keep it long enough just so that it's barely no longer undrinkable?

 

[weirdboy]

Band aid flavors do not go away with time.

 

[hopbrad]

yea, thats the weird thing, none of the beers that i drank over the last 6 months had this flavor. but the few that i cracked this past week did. oh well, the batch is pretty much gone anyway. i have like 4-5 left and will try them too.