Skunking & over bitterness

[ChrisMoss]

Hi all,

I've had a few whole batches go bad now and wanted to ask people's advice.

Three of my brews (all pale ales) have come out with a really bad aftertaste, which tastes overly bitter and can stay in your mouth for a while. Two of them should have only had 35IBUs so it shouldn't be like that. Those 2 taste too bad to drink.

However, the aroma is fine. The most recent two smell great, they just taste bad. Even the first taste is fine, nice hop flavour, but then this nasty bitter flavour takes over.

Also, two of the 3 batches have come out crazy fizzy. The first one produced gushing bottles, the second one normal carbonation and the third one was nuts again. I can't think that this is to do with lack of sanitation infections, as I sanitise every piece of equipment when bottling.

Three beers I've made have come out fine. The first one, which I think I kept mostly out of direct light. And two saisons, which I kept wrapped up by a radiator. So I'm wondering whether the others have been light damaged.

I store my hops in the packets they come in, within a big clear plastic clip top box, but it isn't a sealed/air tight one.

So... What do we think? Skunked? Oxygenated? Infected? Hop storage?

I'm so gutted to have lost three otherwise good batches and really wanting to get my next few right. Would appreciate any ideas as I want to make sure my next pale ale/ipa is the hop beast it deserves to be!

Cheers

Chris

Ps photos of the beer that was gushing and of the one which was ok, both intended to be carbed View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1424455578.423435.jpgView attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1424455618.190053.jpgto 2.4.

 

[azazel1024]

The two things that occur to me are

1) You actually are not sanitizing everything properly.
2) Stuck fermentation

If you are overcarbonated, that will lend a nasty bitter taste because of carbolic acid formation in the beer, because you are dealing with a lot more dissolved CO2 in the beer.

I've had two batches with vaguely similar issues to what you are describing. An Irish Red that was WAY overcarbed (how the F none of the bottles exploded, I have no clue, but I'd guess they were carbed to around 6-8 volumes, but I let a bit of pressure off from each bottle with my bottle opener when I found the issue after a month or so, as for a bit they were okay. I let off pressure maybe 10-12 times per bottle over the course of a couple of days...even a week or two after that they were still at maybe 4 volumes, but no volcanos).

The Irish red had an unpleasantly harsh/bitter taste to it that developed with the overcabonation.

I also have an Oatmeal ESB that is more modestly overcabed, maybe only 4 volumes or so. It has a hint of the bad flavor, but its way in the background. They also like to overflow the bottle and glass if I am not real careful in pouring (or pour in to two pint glasses and then combine). The Oatmeal ESB took a lot longer to develop the overcarbing.

I personally suspect that I have stuck/incomplete carbonation in both batches. Both batches I "rushed" to bottle after I think 2 weeks for the oatmeal ESB and 10 days on the Red Ale. Both were fermented a bit on the cooler side (roughly 63F or so on my concrete slab). I suspect at the cooler temperatures (I normally give a batch 3-4 weeks to ferment out completely before bottling, but I was rushing to get them bottled and carbed by Christmas and Thanksgiving respectively), they had not completed fermentation when I bottled them.

.002 gravity points is roughly 1.5 volums of CO2 and IIRC on my bottling readings, I had roughly 70-72% attenuation on both, which is a little lower than the one other time I've used Windsor yeast (which hit around 76-78% attenuation before) as I used Windsor on both of these beers. The difference could easily have been 3-4 volumes of CO2 on top of my bottling sugar and the already dissolved CO2.

The first one is, with the overcarbed beers, I found that I really was NOT completely sanitizing my bottling stuff. I really needed to pulling my bottling wand, bottling tap and auto-siphon completely apart and soaking them. I had a little bit of mildew built up in each in really hard to reach spots (at least hard to reach if you don't completely pull apart everything). I don't think that is what was causing the overcarbing...but it could have been.

Knock on wood, since I discovered the issue I haven't had the issue anymore. I did have a couple of batches I bottled before I discovered the issue, but each of those had a more proper 3-4 weeks to ferment out before bottling as well as not Windsor yeast and I am certainly now making sure to clean the heck out of all of my bottling stuff.

 

[azazel1024]

One question on the hops, where are they stored?

In the freezer in a ziplock bag, they are probably going to stay fresh for maybe 2 months. In a fridge maybe 4 weeks. Sitting on a shelf, maybe a week or so in a ziplock bag. Hops lose aroma VERY fast. Bitterness not as fast, but still pretty fast. This is mostly an oxygen thing, but also a temperature thing.

The best way to store unused hops is vaccum sealed in the freezer where they'll deffinitely last for a year and possibly several years. Vaccum sealed and in the fridge I'd say a few months at best. Vaccum sealed and at room temperature a few weeks at best.

I'd been using a pound of cascade that I was simply ziplocking and throwing in my fridge and the last few batches have had almost no aroma or bitterness contribution from the cascade. I just did a batch of Amarillo and Cacade Rye APA. All you can smell is the Amarillo and the bitterness level is consistent with what you'd get if I had only used the Amarillo (which was fresh from my LHBS), of around 30IBU, not the nearly 50IBU it should have been with the cascade, and I also used 3oz of Cascade for dry hopping in a 4 gallon batch...zero cascade aroma. The Cascade was almost a year old at this point.

Lesson learned (personally). I hadn't really used it any since last summer when it was only 4-5 months old and stored like that, it did have some lingering aroma and bitternes to it, but probably also why some of my batches where I was using the cascade only for bitterness, or to help plump up IBUs and then something else for flavor and aroma were on the low side for IBUs.

 

[RM-MN]

I have another possibility that has happened to me. You've managed to get a wild yeast into your brewing environment. Some of them can ferment sugars that your normal brewing yeast can't so your final gravity would go down. They work slowly so you might not notice when bottling that the gravity is still going down. I've had brews that should have finished at 1.015 go down to 1.002 or less. That removes all the maltiness and leaves you with a very bitter tasting beer. These wild yeast can also keep fermenting in the bottle so even if you added less than the calculated amount of priming sugar, you end up with bitter beer that gushes. If it infects your beer at bottling time, it can cause bottle bombs too. My beers would ferment out to the expected FG but if I opened the fermenter, the gravity would begin to slowly go down again.

If that is what has happened to you, there is some hope for you. I seem to have gotten rid of mine by setting a furnace filter against a box fan so the air would be filtered and ran that 24/7 for a few weeks, then when summer arrived I opened all the windows to get a good exchange of air.

I'm real sorry that you got this if that is what it is as there is no way to brew good beer until you get rid of the wild yeast.