My Bock tastes awful!

[cornishpasty]

Hello,
I brewed a Bock two weeks ago, and I'm preparing to bottle it this weekend, but it smells and tastes terrible. Here's the situation:

Chocolate malt (crushed)
Caramunich malt (crushed)
Amber malt (syrup)
Munich malt (syrup)
Hallertauer hops (aroma & bittering)
Irish moss
Wyeast 1007 German Ale yeast.

I know Bock is actually supposed to be lagered, but I don't have chilling facilities, and I wanted to experiment by turning it into an ale, hence the WY1007.

The brew went perfectly, and smelt great. The OG was 1.060. The fermentation has been at 62F constantly, bang in the recommended range for WY1007. I'm very careful with sanitation too.

Today, 13 days later, the gravity is at 1.018, pretty much exactly what I expected for this recipe. BUT, it tastes and smells terrible:

It smells like wine, with some green apple in there too. Every instance on this forum seems to indicate the green apple and wine smell comes from excess dextrose, but my recipe has none in it!?

The taste is even worse: it tastes really sweet, not like beer, and has a huge liquorice flavour. It's undrinkable .

I am struggling to detect what has gone wrong. It could be my water, since I used it from the tap. I'm going to do another brew today with bottled water to investigate. BUT I'm suspecting the yeast was bad. So, while doing the brew, I activated the WY1007 with the smackpack (yes the pouch did burst). I left it incubating for a good 18 hours and it didn't swell one bit. In the end, I just opened it and pitched. I wish I had done a starter now to check the yeast, because the fermentation was strange. It was ~36 hours to begin, which is fine, but there was never any krausen build up. All that happened was a very gloopy skin build up on the surface (about 5mm thick). It had some large bubbles in it, but really it was more like trub than foamy krausen. I was worried about this. And yet, the beer went from 1.060 to 1.040 in two days, and down to 1.018 after 13 days.

Any help would be brilliant!

Thanks!

 

[RM-MN]

The green apple is from acetaldehyde, an intermediate product of fermentation. Your beer simply isn't done yet. Warm it up some and give it a few days more and I'll bet that green apple will be gone. You only need the cool ferment for the first few days and then warming it will help the yeast clean up byproducts.

 

[Brulosopher]

The green apple is from acetaldehyde, an intermediate product of fermentation. Your beer simply isn't done yet. Warm it up some and give it a few days more and I'll bet that green apple will be gone. You only need the cool ferment for the first few days and then warming it will help the yeast clean up byproducts.

Exactly. That yeast needs time to do some clean up, and the beer will need time to mellow out the roasted malts. Warming it up for a few days ought to do you some good.

 

[homebrewdad]

Yep. Were I you, I'd get it up to the mid sixties F, and leave it another week.

 

[unionrdr]

It will clean up to an extent,but the licorice flavor I think comes from the ingredients. This reminds me of when pop was making beer. It was a stout that came out strong & licorice flavored like you mentioned. It didn't really age out that much as I remember. But 2 bottles & you were burntoastedwastedfried. Doubling up on the Munich malt might be part of it.

 

[Yooper]

The "licorice" flavor concerns me. It sounds like you have chlorine in your brewing water, creating chlorophenols.

You could try letting it sit, but chlorophenols don't improve with time.

"Wine" smell tends to come from pitching the yeast into wort that is too warm, and/or not using the proper amount of yeast. If the start of fermentation is over the optimum fermentation temperature, that can happen. If it was pitched at 62 degrees with the proper amount of yeast, that can't be it, though.

Edit- I read it again and it sounds like an inadequate yeast pitch (only one package of yeast) and a long lag time. I wonder if you have a couple of things going on- underpitching of yeast and chlorine in the water.

 

[cornishpasty]

Thanks for all the feedback. I have nothing to lose at the moment, so I will try moving it to a warmer place for a few days and seeing if the yeast cleans things up.

Yooper: My wort was definitely cool when I pitched, because I ended up waiting overnight for the smackpack to swell before pitching...

As for underpitching, I had a total wort volume of 3.7 gallons, and used pretty much all of the WY1007 sachet, which is for the standard 5 gallon brew. I was thinking I've probably over pitched, if anything. Could that still have caused trouble?

I would put the lag time down to poor storage of the yeast. It was well within use-by date, but I got it online, so who knows if it's been refrigerated or not. Wyeast say that if it spends too much time out of the fridge then it can cause slow startups.

I suspect that my water might be the problem. Tastes fine to drink, but I presume the fermentation brings out these chlorophenols?

 

[Yooper]

Thanks for all the feedback. I have nothing to lose at the moment, so I will try moving it to a warmer place for a few days and seeing if the yeast cleans things up.

Yooper: My wort was definitely cool when I pitched, because I ended up waiting overnight for the smackpack to swell before pitching...

As for underpitching, I had a total wort volume of 3.7 gallons, and used pretty much all of the WY1007 sachet, which is for the standard 5 gallon brew. I was thinking I've probably over pitched, if anything. Could that still have caused trouble?

I would put the lag time down to poor storage of the yeast. It was well within use-by date, but I got it online, so who knows if it's been refrigerated or not. Wyeast say that if it spends too much time out of the fridge then it can cause slow startups.

I suspect that my water might be the problem. Tastes fine to drink, but I presume the fermentation brings out these chlorophenols?

You definitely didn't overpitch. Check out yeastcalc.com or mrmalty.com to see how many cells you should have pitched. It takes into account the OG, the age of the yeast and probable viability, to get you to the correct amount of yeast. It sounds like your yeast wasn't very viable, and by pitching the next day you probably got some infection.

Licorice flavor is often chlorophenols, as I mentioned, but it can also come from infection as well.

If you have water with chlorine or chloramines and don't remove it, the fermentation can cause those phenolic flavors.

Here's a link with some basic info on off flavors and their causes: http://www.howtobrew.com/section4/chapter21-2.html

 

[YeastHerder]

Almost all municipal water will have chloramines in it as the disinfectant. Campden tablets will solve that part of the problem.

 

[cornishpasty]

Almost all municipal water will have chloramines in it as the disinfectant. Campden tablets will solve that part of the problem.

Ok. I assume naively that they can't solve the problem in this batch though?

 

[cornishpasty]

You definitely didn't overpitch. Check out yeastcalc.com or mrmalty.com to see how many cells you should have pitched. It takes into account the OG, the age of the yeast and probable viability, to get you to the correct amount of yeast. It sounds like your yeast wasn't very viable, and by pitching the next day you probably got some infection.

Licorice flavor is often chlorophenols, as I mentioned, but it can also come from infection as well.

If you have water with chlorine or chloramines and don't remove it, the fermentation can cause those phenolic flavors.

Here's a link with some basic info on off flavors and their causes: http://www.howtobrew.com/section4/chapter21-2.html

Ah, thanks for the info. Seems I could well have underpitched then. And I'm now quite convinced that my yeast was not healthy. It was manufactured in November last year, which, according to yeastcalc makes only 41% viable. I won't be buying liquid yeast from the same place again...

Hmm. Can unhealthy yeast still ferment as normal then? Of course, it might produce some nasty by products.

 

[cornishpasty]

So I think I've found the problem, or at least a contributor. In Palmer's How To Brew, he describes Maillard reactions as potentially giving a liquorice and ballpoint pen aroma. This pretty much fits in with my beer, and after reading other threads on here, realised there were a lot of questions regarding addition of DME/LME at the start of the boil or at the end of the boil.

I added all of mine at the start, and though I didn't burn anything or get a boilover, Palmer says that fully boiling the malt extract can cause Maillard reactions. I remember that when I brewed with kits, I didn't boil the (hopped) LME for that.