Paint Strainer bag for dry hopping?

[daphatgrant]

Hey HBT, I'm a little curious about using paint strainer bags for dry hopping.

Here's what I've got going on.

I made my first beer a couple weeks ago and now that fermentation is done or almost done I'm ready to dry hop. I made a 10gal ipa which was split into 2 fermenters. My post boil was a little light so I have 5 gal in one fermenter and 3.5 in the other that I topped off with filtered water to 4.

Fermentation took a bit to get going but finally started after 4 days and bubbled right along for 2 weeks. Bubbling in the 4gal batch came to a stop on 6/5. I then dry hopped it using a 1 gallon paint strainer bag that I boiled for 5 minutes and then dipped in starsan.

Today I finally had time to take a gravity reading and give it a taste test and it has a pretty aweful plastic taste to it. Initially I thought it was chlorphenol but I did filter the water slowly through a carbon water filter and when I taste tested the 5gal batch that I haven't dry hopped yet I didn't detect any off flavors.

Here is what I used. I just boiled a 2nd bag to dry hop the 5gal batch and I'll be letting the water I used to boil the bag cool so I can see if the bag is the cause of the plastic taste. If the smell of the water is any indication of the taste it might be the bag .

Has anyone had anything similar happen using these? Maybe these are the wrong kind of bags?

Thanks for any help.

 

[brewskiez]

From my experience if it smells bad it will taste bad. They make hop bags from natural fibers for this reason. I used the bags on my first couple of batches now I just throw the hops in the beer straight from the package. All the flakes will settle to the bottom you really don't need the bags.