tasting beer before adding yeast

[chja]

I've been told to taste beer throughout the whole process of brewing and i tasted my beer just before adding yeast, please tell me that it's supposed to taste nothing like the outcome of the beer, because it was awful and I didn't see the point in it. what is it supposed to taste like right before adding yeast?

 

[BainbridgeBrewer]

You'll be fine, fresh wort wont taste like finished beer. It'll taste different depending on the ingredients you used. You probably tasted something that was really sweet, perhaps bitter, and grainy? Everything will join the party with your yeast in the primary and good beer will come out.

 

[Revvy]

I personally don't see the value in tasting beer throughout it's process since in truth we don't drink wort or green beer, we drink finished beer. And as you just noticed wort (as well as green beer) can taste downright nasty.


For the last few years, I boil my wort, pitch my yeast and come back in a month to bottle, tasting the hydro reading on bottling day, but not stressing out about how it tastes. Bottle conditioning and carbonation are two of the most important factors in your finished product. Most of the time until those stages are passed through, you beer is simply going to taste like a$$, even though there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, except that it is young and needs plenty of time for the flavors to come together.

I just never had gleaned anything substantive from early. Despite the rationalization that many new brewer say is for 'educational purposes' I find there's very little to be gleaned tasting a beer at 1 week, and again at 2....that to me just means there 2 less beers that are actually tasting good and are ready at the end. I don't buy budweiser because I don't like to taste "bad" beer. So why would I drink my own beer when it was "bad" especially since I know it's going to be delicious a few weeks later?

It's a great rationalization, and I hear it every time I make my assertion. But the thing to remember is that since every beer is different that 5 day old Ipa you may have decided to crack open is not going to taste anything like that 5 day old brown ale you opened early in your next batch. They're two different animals. There are so many tiny variations in things like ambient temp at fermentation and carbonation, pitch count phases of the moon, that even if you brewed your same batch again and cracked a bottle at the exact same early time on the previous batch, the beer, if you could remember how it tasted, more than likely wouldn't taste the same at that phase....Heck even in the same batch if you had grabbed a different bottle it may seem carbed or tasting differently at that point.

To me all you're doing is wasting a beer that will be excellent when your beer is ACTUALLY carbed and conditioned...

You not going to be able to "fix" anything in the bottle, it's the taste of the final product once it's MATURED" that you want to evaluate for future tweaking, NOT a bottle of green beer.

Many of those things on the "off flavor" charts also have similar tastes to green beer, so you really need those to figure out what went wrong next time, but first you have to pass the window of greeness, which quite often renders whatever you thing is wrong moot, most often those flavors are gone when the beer is no longer green.

It doesn't really matter what a beer tastes like halfway through fermentation, most of mine taste like ****...so I don't bother tasting them at that point. And I suggest to new brewers to do likewise, or else they start threads like this...because it's not halfway through fermentation that is a representation of the finished product....it's after the beer has been carbed and conditioned for about 6 weeks, that is an accurate representation of what a beer tastes like.

Carbonation and conditioning go a long way in a beer's final taste, including hoppiness, taste, aroma, etc. The CO2 lifts the flavors...And bitterness mellows with time.

Read this;

Singljohn hit the nail on the head...The only problem is that you aren't seeing the beer through it's complete process BEFORE calling what is probably just green beer, an off flavor.

It sounds like you are tasting it in the fermenter? If that is the case, do nothing. Because nothing is wrong.

It really is hard to judge a beer until it's been about 6 weeks in the bottle. Just because you taste (or smell) something in primary or secondary DOESN'T mean it will be there when the beer is fully conditioned (that's also the case with kegging too.)

The thing to remember though is that if you are smelling or tasting this during fermentation not to worry. During fermentation all manner of stinky stuff is given off (ask lager brewers about rotten egg/sulphur smells, or Apfelwein makers about "rhino farts,") like we often say, fermentation is often ugly AND stinky and PERFECTLY NORMAL.

It's really only down the line, AFTER the beer has been fermented (and often after it has bottle conditioned even,) that you concern yourself with any flavor issues if they are still there.

I think too many new brewers focus to much on this stuff too early in the beer's journey. And they panic unnecessarily.

A lot of the stuff you smell/taste initially more than likely ends up disappearing either during a long primary/primary & secondary combo, Diacetyl rests and even during bottle conditioning.

If I find a flavor/smell, I usually wait til it's been in the bottle 6 weeks before I try to "diagnose" what went wrong, that way I am sure the beer has passed any window of greenness.

Lagering is a prime example of this. Lager yeast are prone to the production of a lot of byproducts, the most familiar one is sulphur compounds (rhino farts) but in the dark cold of the lagering process, which is at the minimum of a month (I think many homebrewers don't lager long enough) the yeast slowly consumes all those compounds which results in extremely clean tasting beers if done skillfully.

Ales have their own version of this, but it's all the same. Time is your friend.

If you are sampling your beer before you have passed a 'window of greeness" which my experience is about 3-6 weeks in the bottle, then you are more than likely just experiencing an "off flavor" due to the presence of those byproducts (that's what we mean when we say the beer is "green" it's still young and unconditioned.) but once the process is done, over 90% of the time the flavors/smells are gone.

Of the remaining 10%, half of those may still be salvageable through the long time storage that I mention in the Never dump your beer!!! Patience IS a virtue!!! Time heals all things, even beer:

And the remaining 50% of the last 10% are where these tables and lists come into play. To understand what you did wrong, so you can avoid it in the future.

Long story short....I betcha that smell/flavor will be long gone when the beer is carbed and conditioned.

In other words, relax, your beer will be just fine, like 99.5%.

You can find more info on that in here;

Of Patience and Bottle Conditioning.

Just remember it will not be the same beer it is now, and you shouldn't stress what you are tasting right now.

Our beer is more resilient then most new brewers realize, and time can be a big healer. Just read the stories in this thread of mine, and see how many times a beer that someone thought was bad, turned out to be fine weeks later.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/ne...virtue-time-heals-all-things-even-beer-73254/

I would just relax, get the beer carbed and conditioned, and then you'll realize the beer is perfectly fine.

There's an old saying, the best beer in a batch is the last one...Because usually when we get to that final beer, it has conditioned to where it's supposed to be.

So that's why to me there's little value in tasting my wort/beer too soon, that just means less of the beer present when it's actually ready to drink.

But that's just my take on this....Other's have different views.

 

[Yooper]

I taste mine. But I am pretty good at knowing what to expect and how it will finish based on how it starts out. It's not that it tastes at all like the finished beer, but with experience you can get pretty good at tasting some wort, and saying, "Wow- that's going to be GOOD in two weeks!"

 

[Airborneguy]

I taste finished beer before it goes into the keg or bottle, but not wort. Being that I get good attenuation on my beers, I never found the wort to be indicative of the final product's taste.

 

[Revvy]

I taste finished beer before it goes into the keg or bottle, but not wort. Being that I get good attenuation on my beers, I never found the wort to be indicative of the final product's taste.

+1

Most of the time wort to me tastes like bitter Ice Tea with some sort of flower in it. And pretty much smells and tastes the same way to me regardless of the recipe (unless it has some herbs, spices or other special ingredient.) To me it's not pleasant, but at the same time I know that it's not reflective of the finished product.

 

[Airborneguy]

I second the iced tea taste perception.

 

[shelly_belly]

I enjoy tasting my wort. Not that it tastes good or helps or anything, it's just a part of the 'experience'.

 

[Kegcowboy]

word

 

[edmanster]

i like the tast alright but the kiddos really like the tast of the mash gyle.. if they could they would drink it like flavored milk...lol

 

[fall-line]

I love to cook and always placed a lot of value in really tasting and understanding each ingredient that goes into a dish, and then tasting along the way as you build the flavor profile you are looking to achieve. When I started brewing it just made sense for me to want to sample at every phase of the process, even though some of the experiences might not be particularly pleasant.

When I go to the LHBS and get my grain I take one or two hulls of each malt and crush them in my hands to get their smell, then I chew on them to get a sense of their taste. I do the same with the other ingredients that go into beer and when I'm done with the brew process I always take a little sip out of the hydrometer tube just to see how it all came together. Yes, it usually tastes like crappy iced tea with way too much surgar, but each recipe I follow leads to a slightly different crappy iced tea, and I find the experience to be educational.

I also take sips of my hydrometer samples at various stages of fermentation (transferring from primary to secondary for example), but these are samples I'm taking out of the vessel any and are going to be discarded either way. I feel as though I've learned (or at least experienced the evidence of things I've learned by reading) about the impact of different yeasts, fermentation temps, etc by sampling this small bit of beer from time to time.

All that being said, like the more experienced folks here, I have started to refrain from tasting the beer during it's conditioning phase. I was very curious (too curious) with my first few batches of bottles, and drank one a week or so as it conditioned. It satisfied my curiosity, but didn't really teach my anything.. and made me worried that I had made crappy beer! Not to mention it left me with less good beer to drink when the rest was finally done. I feel like I know enough about how beer matures now to know that the beer isn't going to be any good until it's ready. While I still sample a little throughout the process, I definitely take pains to avoid taking any large quantities (say, pouring a glass from the keg or drinking a whole bottle) until I know it's ready.

As Revvy said above, this is just me. Others have different views and I don't think there is really a right and wrong. Just don't get too caught up in what your pre fermentation wort tastes like.. or your fermenting beer.. or your bottle conditioning beer.. Just because it tasted bad, doesn't mean the beer it produces will taste bad.

 

[BrewKnurd]

I second the iced tea taste perception.

Yep. It tastes like what I would think the bottom of a vat of poorly mixed sweet tea might taste like. Too sweet and too bitter to be any good.

As for tasting throughout the aging process, I do. No good reason other than I enjoy seeing how the beer develops. Is it educational? Maybe. Is it usefully educational? Almost certainly not, because as was stated, what am I going to do about anything? Nothing, i'm just gonna let it keep sitting. But I don't really care about the education part, I just enjoy sampling along the way. I totally understand the logical argument of "that's one less good beer to drink at the end." That argument makes perfect sense. But not everything is about sense and logic (even though as an engineer, I sometimes wish it was). Case in point. Adding the dancing banana had no logical explanation, and yet i did it.