What's up with this brew?

[jonaken]

Extract Chinook IPA. Did everything right I'm sure. No real problems. The fist six pack I drank tasted awesome! Full flavor of the chinook hops. BUT there is always quite a few that come out highly carbonated and really awful tasting. This brew is about 2 months in the bottle. Should I be conditioning longer before drinking? Any thoughts?


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[NTXBrauer]

If the taste is awful, it is highly likely you beer was contaminated somehow. This contaminant could also lead to the excessive carbonation.

 

[jonaken]

Basically almost half the brew tastes like sediment in the bottle. The rest tastes awesome. So I'm sure if it was contaminated then the entire brew would suck.


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[Rehlgood]

Did you stir in your priming sugar well?


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[ScottG58]

Describe "awful". It might help.

 

[fantasticmrfox]

How much priming sugar did you use?
What do you mean by awful?


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[jonaken]

2/3 cup priming sugar to 16 oz water as recommended by the northern brewer kit. Tasting awful as is I am drinking the sludge from the bottom of the fermentor. I use a secondary. My beer is clear and I don't pour out the sludge from the bottom of the bottle into my mug. So there is something else happening.


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[fantasticmrfox]

Were all of your bottles new, or were they bottles you cleaned?
Since some of the beer was good, perhaps a few of the bottles weren't cleaned properly.


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[jonaken]

Hmm. That's a good point. Lately I've been using oxy clean and rinsing it completely out with the tap. That might be something I look into.



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[flars]

May be just the way the photo looks, but your glass of beer seems very hazy like there is a lot of suspended yeast. How long did you primary? What was the length of time in the secondary? Bottle temperature for conditioning?

 

[jonaken]

Primary about 2 weeks. Secondary around a month with Dry Hopping in secondary. There doesn't seem to be any floaties. I think it is just chill haze. I conditioned the primary with the swap cooler method at around 65 degrees. Didn't on the secondary. Don't know why. As far as after bottling conditioning, I keep them in a closet that's around 65 deg.


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[flars]

Primary about 2 weeks. Secondary around a month with Dry Hopping in secondary. There doesn't seem to be any floaties. I think it is just chill haze. I conditioned the primary with the swap cooler method at around 65 degrees. Didn't on the secondary. Don't know why. As far as after bottling conditioning, I keep them in a closet that's around 65 deg.


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I usually primary for three weeks to allow the beer to clear and the yeast and trub to compact. 65° is an ideal fermentation temperature for an ale. I do a secondary once in a while for dry hopping. FG has been reached in the primary so I let the secondary rise to ambient temperature which is about 67°. The flavor profile has been set in the first few days of active fermentation.

65° is quite cool for bottle conditioning. It works, but allow an average gravity beer 6 weeks to condition at that temp. You could have most beers conditioned in two weeks at 70° to 75°.

Three to four days of frig time can eliminate the chill haze.

Warm the conditioning bottles and give them two more weeks to see if the flavor improves.

I hope this will help.

Could the off flavor be described as grassy in some of the bottles. A month seems like a long time to dry hop. Others have described a grassy flavor with some hops at over seven days.

 

[jonaken]

I'll try those techniques and see if there's a difference.

The long dry hop didn't seem to effect the flavor. No grassy. The chinook hops came out pretty mild and the first one I had tasted great. I gave one to a buddy and he had it in the fridge for 2 weeks and he said it was the best IPA i made so far.

The one I took a picture of had been in the fridge for a few weeks as well. I even cracked another one at room temp with a chilled glass and it was tolerable at best.


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[cheddarhed3]

I actually just bottled a batch of Chinook IPA yesterday. I'll try to keep track of the post and let you know if I have any of the same issues as well. Seems pretty random so the suggestion about a few dirty bottles would be my guess as well.

 

[CraptainWirtz]

Hmm. That's a good point. Lately I've been using oxy clean and rinsing it completely out with the tap. That might be something I look into.



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After you clean your bottles, are you sanitizing with something like starsan? I'm not sure oxy clean is really a sanitizer so I bet you just have lots of bottles with some level of bacterial contamination.


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[IvanBrew]

After you clean your bottles, are you sanitizing with something like starsan? I'm not sure oxy clean is really a sanitizer so I bet you just have lots of bottles with some level of bacterial contamination.


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Oxy clean is a great cleaner, but it's not a sanitizer. My money's on this...

If some bottles taste great and some are "awful" it's something that varies by bottle. If you cleaned the bottles, but didn't sanitize them, my bet's on some bottles being contaminated and others not...

 

[jonaken]

Yeah I'm definitely going to up my sanitation process.

I do need to point out that I am 3 batches into all-grain brewing and I haven't noticed this problem with any of them...yet. Most of my LME brews have had this particular problem which sometimes resolves itself after a long long conditioning time. Sometimes up to 9 months.


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[mrfluff84]

On top of sanitising the bottles... are you sanitising your caps before capping? It sounds like an issue with the bottles.


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