It smells soooo bad.....

[jaylakejr]

I am making a breakfast stout all grain. My OG is 1.052 and I pitched with S-04, Pitched at 66F and I know that it got down to about 55 before going to about 59 for 3 days. Now it is at 65. I used the same water source I have used in about every beer for the past year, that is about 7 or 8 batches. This is the first beer that I have made that when I took a gravity reading the smell just punches me in the face.... it smells like chemicals... I guess that's the best way to put it. My gravity reading today after 5 days fermenting is 1.024. This is what it looks like.... am I screwed?

 

[AmandaK]

Looks perfect to me.

Fermentation is gross, nasty and smelly. You're just going to have to accept it. (The 'chemical' smell is likely CO2 - burns the nostrils a bit in higher concentrations.)

 

[jaylakejr]

Thanks, I guess I will let it ride for a little while. I am planing on a month long fermentation for this. No secondary.

 

[AmandaK]

Sounds like a great plan.

 

[jaylakejr]

I hate to resurrect a dead post, but i noticed i never got back about this.

Turns out the beer was bad... it was UN-DRINKABLE, we let it ride a few months, put it into a keg, carbed it up and it was like drinking black windex... or what I would think windex would taste like. So we pitched it.

A month later, did the same recipe and turned out that it was one of the best beers I have ever made....

NO idea what went wrong the first time, but my friend made a batch on the same day in the same place with the same water and he had the same issue. I have spent weeks trying to figure out what went wrong and I cant think of anything.

 

[Ben58]

Possibly your water supplier had boosted the chlorine levels due to piping repairs, resulting in this off taste.