Kegged a brew today

[hilljack13]

I kegged my current brew today. Second time using a keg but I did things different. My regulator got messed up on first use; new gauge inbound; so I transferred to the keg and I purged O2, I went 4-5 times on this to make sure all the O2 was out. Then put this in my garage fridge to sit at 34F until whenever. It is also dry hopped. Any issues or anything I should have/could have done different?

I can say using kegs over bottles is like a sin! So much better!

 

[day_trippr]

There are a number of things I do when kegging intended to prolong the potential shelf life.

- Purge the keg before filling: typically I use the fermentation gases produced by one ten gallon batch to purge a pair of 5 gallon cornelius type kegs. If I don't have any empty kegs available during fermentation, I will alternatively perform a "Star San Purge" later on - which is filling the keg leaving no air pockets with a standard Star San and water mixture, then pushing it all back out through the beer out post using CO2 pressure applied to the gas in post. This does require a full length beer out dip tube with its open end properly located in the well at the bottom of the keg, which then will leave barely a teaspoon of Star San mix behind.

- Right before filling, I push 1 teaspoon of Ascorbic Acid powder dissolved in 30 ml of warm water into the still-sealed purged keg via the gas in port: I load it into a 100ml syringe, snap a gas QD on the post and immediately push the fluid into the keg, then remove the QD.

- I fill the keg using a "CO2 Push" technique through a pre-purged line connected to the beer out post, with a relief line connected to the gas in post then submerged in a bucket of water (vs just leaving the PRV latched open, so O2 can't sneak into the keg).

- Once the keg is filled I still do a head-space flush, applying around 12 psi and pulling the PRV for a 5-6 seconds.

With all of that done properly I routinely have kegs of neipas - one of the styles most sensitive to oxidation - that last up to 6 months...

Cheers!

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

You know, as a former (really mediocre) scientist, I think we may be worrying way too much about O2. It takes quite a while to mess up beer, if my experience and the things I've read are any indication, and we seem to keep finding ways in which nearly all of us have screwed up without knowing it. Permeable lines, purging kegs but not lines, failing to seal every leak during fermentation, yada, yada, yada.

I used to keg beer with no effort to exclude O2 because it was the Stone Age and no one knew any better, and I had beers that tasted great after weeks or even months in the keg. I work to do better now, but I think I'm too compulsive. My big problems were with infection, not oxygen. I can't recall ever having a beer that tasted oxidized.

If you purge a full keg a few times, you should be doing a great job of getting rid of O2. You can do simple algebra and get a SWAG as to what your final O2 percentage is, and it should be really small. I bet. It's an exponential decrease. I'm too lazy to do the math, but I remember how exponents work. Multiply something like 0.2 by itself several times and you get nearly nothing.

On top of that, beer will keep fermenting in the keg even if the temperature is low and you dumped the yeast cake when you kegged, and fermentation eats O2. No one seems to want to talk about that, but it's true. Your yeast manufacturer may say you should ferment at 60 or 55 or whatever, but yeast will still do something even in the thirties.

The other day, I realized I never purged gas lines before using them to purge kegs. Oh, no! And if an O-ring fails to seal perfectly it will let O2 in even if the gas inside the keg or fermenter is under pressure and constantly pushing CO2 out. Chemist say the fact that one gas is going out has nothing to do with another gas's efforts to get in. As far as gas molecules can tell, they are miles apart. They don't bump into each other and prevent each other from getting into things. I'm pretty sure. There is some law that explains this. Something with Graham in it, maybe.

We're always doing something wrong, but we keep making great beer that lasts a reasonably long time.

I have no idea how OP dry-hopped, but you can do that without introducing O2.

 

[mac_1103]

I purged O2, I went 4-5 times on this to make sure all the O2 was out.

That's not nearly enough to get "all" the O2 out. You need something like 20 cycles.

 

[day_trippr]

I think we may be worrying way too much about O2.

My experience says otherwise.
How many neipas have you brewed and kegged and kept around for more than a month?
iirc, that would be zero?

Cheers!

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

Well, I AM an adult, and I don't eat Froot Loops with root beer instead of milk.

Do NEIPAS go bad because of O2, or because they're full of fragile dry-hop chemicals that go funny with or without O2? Seems pretty obvious it's the latter, because otherwise their other beers would wilt after a couple of months, and they indisputably do not.

You're talking to the guy who got Sierra Nevada to send him a check because they didn't trust Hazy Little Thing to last more than a few weeks, but they trust their other beers to last a long time. Is Sierra Nevada dumping O2 into Hazy Little Thing, or is its short shelf life caused by the weird nature of juice bomb pale ales?

Torpedo is made by the same company, and it lasts months and months.

 

[hilljack13]

That's not nearly enough to get "all" the O2 out. You need something like 20 cycles.

After you fill it up? Seems excessive.

 

[Bobby_M]

I can't recall ever having a beer that tasted oxidized.

You either have a high threshold for those flavors or you don't know exactly what you're looking for. That's not a rip on you as a character flaw, it's just how it goes. It takes a long time to figure it out through careful tasting of fresh commercial beer styles and comparing them to dozens of homebrewed versions, some with extremely obvious oxidation character, to finally put the pieces together. I'm confident that my beers from 15 years ago were pretty bad in this department.

 

[Bobby_M]

Do NEIPAS go bad because of O2..?

Yup. Stop right there. O2 rips the soul of hop aroma and flavor right out of the beer, hazy or not. It just so happens that it also turns hazy IPA a revolting shade of purple/brown shortly after that hop stripping phase.

I've had well cared for hazy IPA taste fresh out of the keg after 4 months, but not much longer.

Breweries are extra uptight about their beer's age out in the wild primarily because they know distributors and retail bottle shops have little respect for the product and will leave it sitting in a hot truck or at room temp on the shelf for way too long. Time, temperature and oxygen are the 3 evils of beer spoilage.

 

[Bobby_M]

After you fill it up? Seems excessive.

It definitely seems excessive which is why no one would instinctively do it. It took actual residual O2 testing to prove that it takes that many purge cycles and it's up to the individual brewer to decide if it's worth the CO2 or not. I don't ever challenge myself like that and just fill the keg with starsan and push that out with CO2 which essentially guarantees an O2 free environment.

 

[mac_1103]

After you fill it up? Seems excessive.

Search the forum. People have posted charts. But remember, you're not going to burn through all that much CO2 when you're only purging the small headspace of a full keg.

I don't eat Froot Loops with root beer instead of milk

Come on man. Live a little.

 

[day_trippr]

Do NEIPAS go bad because of O2, or because they're full of fragile dry-hop chemicals that go funny with or without O2? Seems pretty obvious it's the latter, because otherwise their other beers would wilt after a couple of months, and they indisputably do not.

Right then. You are demonstrably unqualified to judge beers.

Cheers!

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

That's not a rip on you as a character flaw, it's just how it goes.

We're getting too serious when we worry that the ways we perceive the taste of beer could be character flaws. There are fine people who hate beer, and MOST fine people can't tell one beer from another. I am not offended.

It takes a long time to figure it out through careful tasting of fresh commercial beer styles and comparing them to dozens of homebrewed versions

If that is true, then slight O2 flavors are not a big problem. If they were a big deal, everyone would notice them and be upset about them. I've never had a beer that tasted like cardboard or any of that other stuff. Maybe I've made beers that would have been slightly better had they been handled perfectly, but there is no way to double-blind beers that are already history, and I didn't do it when I still had them on hand for the same reason I don't weigh biscuit flour with a recently-calibrated lab scale costing $4000.

On this very forum, people who supposedly know a lot have repeatedly said that O2 issues take at least a couple of months to show up. I defer to their expertise, but if someone who seems better informed shows up, I'll defer to his instead. I don't claim to know, personally, exactly how long problems take to develop or how much O2 is needed to cause them. If the people I choose to assume are right are wrong, they're wrong.

I do know that some of the procedures touted here either can't work to achieve near-zero O2 levels or are insufficient without more, but I won't go into that for fear of putting unhelpful fears into people or starting a new pedantry contest. Which I may have already done unintentionally.

I've had well cared for hazy IPA taste fresh out of the keg after 4 months, but not much longer.

We all know other types of beer last longer, often without being cared for all that well. The type of beer, not the O2, appears to be the bigger issue with NEIPA.

Right then. You are demonstrably unqualified to judge beers.

This isn't helpful and makes it look like you know you realize I made a point you can't counter. Are you sure you want to post remarks like this? It's not like I blackballed you and kept you off the pep squad. I just said something about beer.

People here say NEIPA beers go off quickly, with or without O2. If true, O2 isn't relevant to this particular issue. That's obvious. If it isn't true, why not tell us and then tell us how you know?

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

I'm confident that my beers from 15 years ago were pretty bad in this department.

You are obviously a person who likes and recognizes good beer, so I have to ask: how could they have been "pretty bad"? I think you would have dumped them if you hadn't enjoyed them. If a person who doesn't like bad beer enjoyed these beers, they must have been good, even if they were not perfect.

 

[Bobby_M]

We're getting too serious when we worry that the ways we perceive the taste of beer could be character flaws. There are fine people who hate beer, and MOST fine people can't tell one beer from another. I am not offended.

If that is true, then slight O2 flavors are not a big problem. If they were a big deal, everyone would notice them and be upset about them. I've never had a beer that tasted like cardboard or any of that other stuff. Maybe I've made beers that would have been slightly better had they been handled perfectly, but there is no way to double-blind beers that are already history, and I didn't do it when I still had them on hand for the same reason I don't weigh biscuit flour with a recently-calibrated lab scale costing $4000.

On this very forum, people who supposedly know a lot have repeatedly said that O2 issues take at least a couple of months to show up. I defer to their expertise, but if someone who seems better informed shows up, I'll defer to his instead. I don't claim to know, personally, exactly how long problems take to develop or how much O2 is needed to cause them. If the people I choose to assume are right are wrong, they're wrong.

I do know that some of the procedures touted here either can't work to achieve near-zero O2 levels or are insufficient without more, but I won't go into that for fear of putting unhelpful fears into people or starting a new pedantry contest. Which I may have already done unintentionally.

We all know other types of beer last longer, often without being cared for all that well. The type of beer, not the O2, appears to be the bigger issue with NEIPA.

This isn't helpful and makes it look like you know you realize I made a point you can't counter. Are you sure you want to post remarks like this? It's not like I blackballed you and kept you off the pep squad. I just said something about beer.

People here say NEIPA beers go off quickly, with or without O2. If true, O2 isn't relevant to this particular issue. That's obvious. If it isn't true, why not tell us and then tell us how you know?

I don't know how to explain why some people can detect subtle to moderate flaws while others can't (or even relatively extreme flaws in some cases). I know some people who are completely immune/blind to diacetyl even when the beer smells like a microwave popcorn factory. It's indisputable that different people have different sensitivities to the flavor and aroma compounds found in beer. Some of that sensitivity is compound specific, and in other cases people just have muted sensory across the board. Those people can't be beer judges because they'll never pass the tasting exam no matter how much they know about beer styles on paper.

Nevertheless, beer quality is in the eye of the beerholder. If you like the beer and you can't imagine it getting any better, there's no motive to go looking for the flaws or trying to mitigate them. It changes if you're trying to share your beer with people who may notice those flaws and you care what they think. In other words there is an objective difference between saying "there is no oxidation in my beer" and "I can't detect oxidation and therefore I do not care if there is". However, if you're the only one that drinks the beer, the difference doesn't matter.

The effects of oxidation/staling will show in all beer styles, not just NEIPA. It's just that hops and light hazy appearance are the two signature attributes of that style so it goes downhill faster than most styles. That does not mean that varying levels of handling missteps can't accelerate the downfall of NEIPA. Not even close. Here, read this: https://scottjanish.com/headspace-hazy-ipa-oxidation/

Styles that are relatively neutral, neither hop or malt forward will get away with more oxidation before they don't taste right. Some styles like barleywine, imperial stout, old ale, have mild oxidation notes as part of their signature character.

 

[day_trippr]

This isn't helpful and makes it look like you know you realize I made a point you can't counter. Are you sure you want to post remarks like this? It's not like I blackballed you and kept you off the pep squad. I just said something about beer.

Your words binning oxidation effects to the utterly terminal "cardboard" phase demonstrates you don't comprehend all the evident carnage extant well prior to that point when oxidation is at play. And that doesn't matter what kind of beer being described, though some are much more fragile and quicker to degrade to the point that even tyros that miss a lot can pick up that something is wrong.

So there's that...

Cheers!

 

[sibelman]

I'm pretty sure my palate is not super discriminating. However, after experiencing a near total disappearance of NEIPA floral hop character after only a few days, I got more serious about excluding cold-side oxygen.

It seems to have improved the flavor/aroma longevity of dry hopped IPAs, which I make often. And I'm not finding it very burdensome to purge serving kegs with fermentation gas. So: low pain, considerable gain.

But if you're not feeling the gain, @Clint Yeastwood, then it could make sense to relax your anti-oxygen efforts. In contrast, @Bobby_M educated his palate and got into beer competing, with considerable success. None of this means any of us is drinking "bad beer."

btw, I've largely lost interest in brewing hazy/juicy/NEIPA beers anyhow.

 

[bike2brew]

Yup. Stop right there. O2 rips the soul of hop aroma and flavor right out of the beer, hazy or not. It just so happens that it also turns hazy IPA a revolting shade of purple/brown shortly after that hop stripping phase.

I've had well cared for hazy IPA taste fresh out of the keg after 4 months, but not much longer.

Breweries are extra uptight about their beer's age out in the wild primarily because they know distributors and retail bottle shops have little respect for the product and will leave it sitting in a hot truck or at room temp on the shelf for way too long. Time, temperature and oxygen are the 3 evils of beer spoilage.

Revolting brown/purple seems like a reliable indicator of spoilage to me. I imagine I would look for another beer if my pour came out like that.

 

[Bobby_M]

Revolting brown/purple seems like a reliable indicator of spoilage to me. I imagine I would look for another beer if my pour came out like that.

There are a couple downsides to being a homebrew shop owner that tastes beer to help diagnose issues and being a beer judge where you kind of have to taste the beer to properly evaluate it.

Just in case it's interesting, when hazy IPA starting catching on big time in around 2018, the NEIPA category judging tables were the biggest of any competition. There would be like 28 entries split between 3 pairs of judges. Often only 5-6 of them would be even close to in the running for a medal because that's how few didn't pour brown/grey/purple. It's challenging enough to get a hazy into a keg, carbed and settled down without oxidation. It's a whole other thing to effectively use a beergun to get that beer safely into bottles in a way that will survive the few weeks of questionable storage that happens prior to a competition. I always say that competitions are 80% brewing and 20% packaging or whatever mix you want to use to know that it's all super important.

As the style has matured, the percentage of good entries have increased though the total number coming in has waned slowly. Maybe people that couldn't figure out the packaging and just gave up on that particularly sensitive style. Again, it's not JUST that style as I've never judged a single table that didn't have a few examples of very bad oxidation.

If anyone thinks I'm standing on some kind of soap box on this, think again. I've personally scored in the low 20s on NEIPAS that were fantastic on bottling day. I've also dumped full kegs from an unnoticed lid leak.

 

[Broken Crow]

@hilljack13 Thanks for the entertaining thread! I haven't seen a fun O2 polemic like this in a while.
@Bobby_M Thanks for the timeline! I'd been lurking here for years before I signed up, and I remember being very cautious about posting as around 2020 no matter what question a person asked, the thread got hijacked into pages of arguments about O2....so much so I eventually coined the term "O2CD" as a psychological disorder. I suspect it was a lot of NEIPA brewers proselytizing. That said; In my journey from stove-top pre-hopped kit in carboys and bottles to AG in kegs: Every step I took to eliminate O2 exposure paid off in the best way we can hope for: Now when I pour a beer and drink it and am fully satisfied and don't for a moment have cause to think "this could be better", or "I did something wrong". (Except with new and experimental batches of course.) So:

Any issues or anything I should have/could have done different?

Continue doing as you are doing: Pay attention to the taste and detail, letting your methods evolve in a way that best suits you, and keep talking about it on here until one day you enjoy without a second thought.

 

[doug293cz]

Search the forum. People have posted charts. But remember, you're not going to burn through all that much CO2 when you're only purging the small headspace of a full keg.

I am the "People" for those charts and graphs. Just for reference, commercial breweries target less than 150 ppb (parts per billion) TPO (total packaged oxygen) for IPAs, and maybe even less for NEIPAs.

The chart/table:

Brew on

 

[sibelman]

fwiw, though I've experienced hop flavor/aroma degradation for sure, I've never seen the brown/grey/purple colors mentioned above, nor experienced "cardboard" flavors in kegged beer. So I guess my O2 game wasn't too awful, but also wasn't good enough for durable hazy NEIPA splendor.

Maybe I should try again, as a check on my process improvements. Maybe I should just RDWHAHB. Damn, that sounds good.

 

[Bobby_M]

@hilljack13 Thanks for the entertaining thread! I haven't seen a fun O2 polemic like this in a while.
@Bobby_M Thanks for the timeline! I'd been lurking here for years before I signed up, and I remember being very cautious about posting as around 2020 no matter what question a person asked, the thread got hijacked into pages of arguments about O2....so much so I eventually coined the term "O2CD" as a psychological disorder. I suspect it was a lot of NEIPA brewers proselytizing. That said; In my journey from stove-top pre-hopped kit in carboys and bottles to AG in kegs: Every step I took to eliminate O2 exposure paid off in the best way we can hope for: Now when I pour a beer and drink it and am fully satisfied and don't for a moment have cause to think "this could be better", or "I did something wrong". (Except with new and experimental batches of course.) So:

Continue doing as you are doing: Pay attention to the taste and detail, letting your methods evolve in a way that best suits you, and keep talking about it on here until one day you enjoy without a second thought.

It's kind of a strange phenomena to me. This argument back and forth between brewers about where off flavors come from, how careless you can be and still get away with a beer that tastes good enough (depending on who is doing the tasting), whether certain off flavors are a big enough problem to care about, etc. It really doesn't matter how self-effacing one is, how one admits that they were wrong about their fantastic good enough beer and eventually saw the light through progression of understanding and palate calibration and training. We march on and continue to take flak for approaching the hobby with elitism as if we have something to gain by trying to help people realize their blind spots.

I guess I'll leave this here. If your beer is as good as you need it to be, perfect! If you think it's as good as it can be, FALSE!

 

[JAReeves]

I am the "People" for those charts and graphs. Just for reference, commercial breweries target less than 150 ppb (parts per billion) TPO (total packaged oxygen) for IPAs, and maybe even less for NEIPAs.

The chart/table:

View attachment 842365

View attachment 842366

Brew on

This Wisdom from the Elders is why I purge the headspace of any keg 15 times, including when I make mineral water, and I add 1tsp of Ascorbic Acid to kegs of fermented beverages. It's not perfect, but it means I can RDWHAHB more often.

 

[mac_1103]

including when I make mineral water

Does oxygen damage water?

 

[JAReeves]

Does oxygen damage water?

I read a thread a few years ago that mentioned that O2 in the headspace slows down the CO2 absorption. I figured since there is only so much room for gas anyway, it was rational that filling it with CO2 would speed up the effect I wanted anyway (fizzy H2O). Do not ask me about the rules regarding gaseous dynamics, I'm a theologian. I trust the science folks to get it right.

 

[day_trippr]

I am the "People" for those charts and graphs.

Yes, you are. And don't ever leave...

Cheers!

 

[doug293cz]

Yes, you are. And don't ever leave...

Cheers!

Thanks. I don't plan on leaving voluntarily, but then I am old.

Brew on

I read a thread a few years ago that mentioned that O2 in the headspace slows down the CO2 absorption. I figured since there is only so much room for gas anyway, it was rational that filling it with CO2 would speed up the effect I wanted anyway (fizzy H2O). Do not ask me about the rules regarding gaseous dynamics, I'm a theologian. I trust the science folks to get it right.

Other gases in the headspace (O2, N2, etc.) contribute to the gauge pressure. Carbonation rate, and equilibrium level, depend on the CO2 partial pressure. If you have air in the headspace when you start, and pressurize to 12 psi with CO2, then the CO2 partial pressure is 12 psi, and the air partial pressure is 14.7 psi. But the carbonation charts and calculators assume the headspace is 100% CO2, so 12 psi gauge pressure is 26.7 psi CO2 partial pressure. If you don't purge the air from headspace, you will end up undercarbonated.

Brew on

 

[JAReeves]

Thanks. I don't plan on leaving voluntarily, but then I am old.

Brew on

Other gases in the headspace (O2, N2, etc.) contribute to the gauge pressure. Carbonation rate, and equilibrium level, depend on the CO2 partial pressure. If you have air in the headspace when you start, and pressurize to 12 psi with CO2, then the CO2 partial pressure is 12 psi, and the air partial pressure is 14.7 psi. But the carbonation charts and calculators assume the headspace is 100% CO2, so 12 psi gauge pressure is 26.7 psi CO2 partial pressure. If you don't purge the air from headspace, you will end up undercarbonated.

Brew on

This makes as much sense to me as Biblical Hebrew, which is why I rely on the experts.

 

[doug293cz]

This makes as much sense to me as Biblical Hebrew, which is why I rely on the experts.

All you need to remember is that the headspace needs to be 100% CO2 in order for the carbonation level to be what you expect.

Brew on

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

But if you're not feeling the gain, @Clint Yeastwood, then it could make sense to relax your anti-oxygen efforts. In contrast, @Bobby_M educated his palate and got into beer competing, with considerable success. None of this means any of us is drinking "bad beer."

btw, I've largely lost interest in brewing hazy/juicy/NEIPA beers anyhow.

I'm not planning on going backward on purpose. I do enough of that unintentionally. I do try to limit O2. I try to take whatever good advice I see here. That's why I signed up.

I ferment under pressure. I use a keg full of sanitizing solution to receive fermented beer. I pump the fluid out using CO2, and then I pump beer in to replace the CO2. I don't open anything up to the air after fermentation starts. I'm probably doing about as well as most people here. But is the process perfect? If I pick at it, I can see little things that might have permitted a tiny amount of air to get in. Enough to cause a problem? Search me. All I'm saying is that it looks like there are things that could be improved.

I think I get something like 2000 ml of headspace in a filled keg, and I would guess several ml of air, or 1/5 of several ml of O2 (by volume) could get in there if I use the practices people talk about here and nothing more. So call it 1 ml. That's 0.5 parts per thousand, not million, so 500 ppm. Is that right? Someone check. That's 500,000 ppb, so somewhat higher than the 150 ppb cited above as a commercial goal. If I'm doing better than I think, by a factor of 10, I'm still at 50,000 ppb. A little high.

I have read that O2 takes a couple of months to cause off-flavors. I know that when I move beer to a serving keg, I'm agitating the yeast, and if there is anything in the beer it can still eat, it probably will, and that would presumably use up O2. Would it use up enough, fast enough, to eat whatever O2 gets in due to little things no one cautioned me about, before the O2 can do harm? No idea, but I'm smart enough to ask the question. What if I have 5 ml of O2 in the keg, and the yeast eats it in two weeks? Does that save me? Does anyone even know?

I have looked at the list of off-flavors. I think it's possible I've detected a sherry flavor in one beer, but I liked it, so I don't know what to say about that.

Somewhere I saw this list: “Any one or a combination of stale, winy/vinous, cardboard, papery, or sherry-like aromas and flavors.” Stale? Never. Winy? That's a tough one. What kind of wine? I wouldn't mind a tiny bit of resemblance to good Champagne in certain beers. Cardboard? Never. Papery? No. Sherry-like? Conceivably, but I would have to try a beer that definitely had an O2-generated sherry flavor in order to really know.

It's easy to list off-flavor descriptions, but I don't think anyone can hope to know exactly what they taste like without deliberate exposure to train the palate. How many of us have done that? Maybe I'm tasting a sherry off-flavor, or maybe this combination of yeast, malt, and hops just has a flavor that could be a little bit like sherry without being the result of O2 contamination. I think somebody out there offers a kit of samples to train people. Maybe someone here knows more.

Regarding OP, he will probably knock this keg off before two months have passed. Even if he did things badly, he will probably enjoy the beer, and he will surely improve his technique as time passes.

When I say I think people may be too worried about small amounts of O2, I don't mean that O2 doesn't hurt fermented beer. I just mean that minute amounts of O2 may not be a huge issue for most of us, who don't mind or necessarily notice small flaws and don't keep beer for long periods. I would rather have a slightly flawed glass of my beer than a perfect can of Coors.

 

[day_trippr]

I have read that O2 takes a couple of months to cause off-flavors.

Yeah, no. There have been too-many-to-count posts on HBT about beers that were kegged and within a couple of weeks (or even less!) had lost all aroma, most of the good flavors, and were obviously browning. To force one's self to consume beer that bad is too horrible to contemplate.

"Cardboard and Sherry" are the walking undead of beer - I mean, the beer was horribly oxidized well before those two creatures arrived on the scene. It starts with aroma attenuation, then "flavor" attenuation, and then cloying sweetness. I've never tasted what happens next - that "cardboard and sherry" thing - as the beer was already long gone and tasting it further would be self-abuse

Cheers!

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

All styles? Certain styles? I have not seen a brown beer yet, except those that started out brown.

 

[Bobby_M]

All styles? Certain styles? I have not seen a brown beer yet, except those that started out brown.

Not seen in "your" beers? Do you get the chance to taste much homebrew outside of your own? I mean, I'm judging a competition in a couple weeks and I'll snap pictures of all the weird stuff assuming I get tables that are not already brown on purpose.

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

I just want to know if this is something to expect with every style. I'm asking for information, not looking to dispute anything. When I say I haven't seen beer turn brown, I am referring to my own brews.

 

[day_trippr]

When someone uses "browned" in a negative construct you can safely assume it wasn't supposed to be "brown"...

Cheers!

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

Yes, that part, I figured out on my own.

 

[day_trippr]

Right then.

In my scope of brewing to style - not all that broad, I confess, compared to some - all styles degrade from oxidation, but some degrade more obviously than others, with "hazy" IPAs topping my list. But pale ales and bright ipas can readily become victims to O2 abuse, it just might take longer to become evident. And wheat beers also readily show it - they're generally brewed to be lighter and brighter in character compared to barley ales, so off-notes and browning can't hide for long.

As I look back on my brewing progression I would say the most important positive influence on my processes/technique/equipment has been oxidation avoidance. It governs everything wrt lifecycles here, and the benefit is I can keep six beers on tap, brewing 10 gallon batches, and never have to dump beer.

And it didn't start that way at all...

Cheers!

 

[Bobby_M]

..., and the benefit is I can keep six beers on tap, brewing 10 gallon batches, and never have to dump beer.

This can't be ignored. If a brewer were the type to consume their beer in a more linear fashion; brew batch 2 while drinking batch 1 and so on, the effects for early damage may not be fully realized because the beer is consumed fast enough. Since I don't drink much but I brew much, I have a lot of beer in kegs that go long. 8-12 months sometimes. I also hold on to beer a while so I can get 5 or more entries into the competitions as they come around.