Beer has weird smell and off flavor

[powerpunk5000]

Just brewed and bottled a milkshake ipa. It's fermented in primary for about 3 weeks. After 5 days I added 3lbs off frozen strawberries I cooked and blended on the stove to sterilize them, I just dumped them right into the fermenter. Then i added my dry hops poured them right into the fermenter and bottled 3-5 after.

So the beer has been bottled now for about 10 days. The beer was siphoned on top of my priming sugar. An I used just a regular spicket to fill the bottles since my bottle wand broke. I know this is not optimal but holding the beer at and angle and filling them shouldn't introduce to much oxygen?

So upon tasting the beer immediately noticed a off smell. I'm not even sure how to describe it other then stale off smell. And the beer taste normal but this weird off flavor seems to bounce off the back of your throat. I'm not sure what it could be other than maybe oxygenated beer? Anyone please help I invested particularly alot in this brew with lots of hops vanilla lactose and fruit.

 

[powerpunk5000]

Also 3 granny smith apples were added into the mash. @ about 15 mins.

The wort was carried as gently as possible upstairs in a bottling bucket with no lid then bottled in that bucket with no lid

 

[AZCoolerBrewer]

I recently oxygenated the crap out of a testing bottle of Barleywine. All the other bottles were fine but the one was treated poorly in every way you could to expose it to oxygen. It very clearly changed color by 8-10 SRM. I suspect that if I had let that bottle age, it would have had a nasty stale taste, as it was I found that at the 3 week mark post bottling, the color was the only thing that was affected. So for my money oxygenation affects beer long term. So I think that you have another issue.

I am wondering about LME “twang”. Are you all grain or did you use extract?

I rack my beer onto a syrup of sugar that I boil on the stove for 3 minutes, so I suppose something could have been in the sugar. I have heard that dry sugar is an extremely harsh environment for microscopic bugs, but it is common for me to see a small fleck of black stuff in my sugar syrup, so it’s possible that a flake of something in the sugar could harbor bugs. But then I think people would have more trouble with other dry sugar products like domino dots and stuff.

How about your water? Chloromines maybe?

 

[dmtaylor]

Hard to say what's going on without tasting it myself. You might not enjoy the taste of fermented strawberries, or could have gotten contamination from the dry hops, or who knows.

I have brewed many apple ales. I can safely say that 3 Granny Smith apples in your mash didn't do a dang thing. If anything, the beer might turn out marginally more tart than it would have otherwise. But probably not even that. No flavor impact at all. You would have to use like half a bushel or gallons of fresh pressed juice to get anything out of apples.

 

[GPP33]

Between racking into a bottling bucket, carrying it around and bottling without a lid and filling bottles without a wand you highly oxygenated that beer. I’ve never heard of oxidized beer having those characteristics though. To be honest an apple strawberry IPA sounds pretty gross so maybe the problem is in the recipe?

What yeast did you use and what was the ferm temp? Yeasts can make some funky fart smells. The back of the throat bite might mellow a bit, could be carbonic acid from carbonating or maybe something produced when the strawberries fermented. I’d say give it some time for the undesirables to subside and hope that the oxygen got used up by the yeast during priming.

 

[S-Met]

Dropping sugar from strawberries makes them really tart and usually takes a few weeks or more for the harshnesd to soften. IPAs are best young which suggests that the ipa or strawberries might have a sweet spot where the two may be balanced. But your ipa will be on the old side while the strawberry is still young. Strawberries are 85+% citric acid, then malic and some other acids I cant remember.

My best guess is to condition at cellar temp, taste each week and hope for a balanced point. When you get there, drink it fast. There is a possibility that the best you will get is mediocre.