Who put soy sauce in my Imperial Pale Ale?

[DatsyukianDeke]

On 6/2 I brewed an Imperial Pale Ale using the recipe from Extreme Brewing by Sam Calagione. I brewed using the same process as my other brews, split the LME as an early and late addition, bittering hops (1oz Simcoe) at 60', remaining LME, Irish Moss and nutrient at 15' then half ounce each of Mosaic and Citra at 10' and again at flameout. Chilled then poured trub and all into my fermentor where I pitched my yeast at 65 degrees. Then after the third day of fermentation I added a half pound of light brown sugar dissolved in 2c of boiling water, shook well and let ride for another week. Dry hopped with an ounce each of Mosaic and Citra and let sit for 5 days the bottled. I was already tasting the soy sauce flavor at bottling and it had only been 16 days since brew day. I normally leave my beer on the yeast cake for 2-3 weeks with no problems.

I'm guessing it had to be my yeast. I used the dregs from two bottles of session CDA I made using 1272. Made a starter using 1c DME to 1.3L water boiled and cooled then split between 2 quart size mason jars (sanitized of course). The starter looked fine and fermentation went great. OG was 1.082 and FG ended up at 1.022.

Any ideas what went wrong? It's frustrating since this is the second time I've tried brewing a bigger IPA (first was the NB Dead Ringer kit) only to have to trash the whole batch due to off flavors (NB kit ended up with bad fusel alcohol flavor due to high ferm temps).

 

[Beernik]

Soy sauce off flavor is usually caused by autolysis.

If this is what it is, there may have been damaged or weakened yeast cells in the dregs and at damage or weakness propagated itself into your starter. Or yu you could have had some nutrient deficient LME.

 

[Brew_G]

I can't help you with what might cause a flavor of soy sauce, but adding the brown sugar on the third day of fermentation - *then shaking it* - isn't the best of ideas.