Will Green Apple Flavor "Age Out?"

[kdw2pd]

About 4 months ago, I brewed a DIPA based on Northern Brewer's Plinian Legacy. Mash went fine, ~152, pitched at 65F, put in closet. No temp control. We went through a cold snap around that time, so I had closed the closet door and set the space heater on low. One day I had left the door open after checking on the beer, the cats managed to knock the space heater around to be pretty much directly facing the fermenter, so it got into the low 90s. Obviously not good. I left it in secondary for about a month or so, hoping that some of the sour off-flavors would dissipate, and they did, somewhat. I bottled it in early May.

Skip ahead a couple months, it's been bottled for a while now. It was brutal in early June, tasted like concentrated Granny Smith's with some bitterness. Now, the flavor isn't too noticeable until the beer begins to warm up towards room temp.

So the question is: will it continue to smooth out if I let it sit for another couple of months? Option B would be to brew another couple of gallons of the same recipe, mix the bottled beer with the new wort, let the yeast work on both and hopefully let them clean up the acetaldyhyde.

One related question: if I had re-yeasted this beer at bottling, would that have helped at all? I have a fermentation fridge now, but in case I screw something else up in the future.

 

[passedpawn]

I had this in my barleywine. It took a couple of years to mostly go away, but I can still detect it. Nasty, I can't touch a beer with any of that. I wouldn't hesitate to dump, but that's up to you.

 

[fizgig]

Acetaldehyde should be metabolized by the yeast if kept warm, but this sounds like esters from high fermentation temps. They will age out somewhat, but so will your hop flavors. I might taste like strong bitter or weak barleywine if you keep aging it out.

 

[Beernik]

My very first brew was a green apple bomb because I pitched at 100F.

It did lessen over time, but it never completely went away.

Use the BMC method: drink it ice cold so you minimize the perception of bad flavors.

 

[biertourist]

Acetaldehyde should be metabolized by the yeast if kept warm, but this sounds like esters from high fermentation temps. They will age out somewhat, but so will your hop flavors. I might taste like strong bitter or weak barleywine if you keep aging it out.

Yep.
Make a "krausen bier": just make a yeast starter with an alcohol tolerant yeast strain and pitch it into your beer at high krausen. -Even better is to reuse some of the yeast from the yeast cake of another high alcohol fermentation and make a starter with it as the yeast will then already have alcohol tolerance.

Krausening the beer will reduce the acetaldehyde faster than just letting it sit on the yeast for an extended period of time AND you reduce your risk of autolysis.


Krausening is very much like "re-yeasting" but better for cleaning up fermentation by products like Acetaldehyde and diacetyl; if you use a krausening calculator you can even let the krausen beer provide your "priming sugar" to carbonate the beer so you get the best of both worlds. (But you get extra yeast in the bottle then.) Personally I'd add the krausen beer in the fermenter, let it reduce the acetaldehyde and THEN bottle as normal.

 

[kdw2pd]

Thanks everyone! I thought about chucking it, but Simcoe and Citra are frackin' expensive from the LHBS here, so I've got too damn much $$ invested in this beer. A couple of follow-up questions:
1.) Pitch rate for "krausening": I'll be using about 2 week old slurry of harvested Bell's yeast (basically American Ale II), which is what I used to ferment it originally. Since it isn't a classic starter, what should I use for a target pitch rate?
2.) Should I toss in any extract to give the krausening yeast something to chew on, while they hopefully clean up my mess?

One option I considered was basically making a 1 gallon extract version of what I had brewed initially, cooling it down, de-gassing the bottled beers, adding them to the unfermented 1 gallon of wort, and treating it like a low gravity new brew. 1 gallon of 1.07ish wort added to 28 bottles worth of beer that finished at 1.01 gives me a gravity of what, about 1.04 or so? Enter that as the pitch rate, and then pitch yeast starter at high krausen. Would this work?

 

[Calichusetts]

I used to get it all the time when I used a secondary. I would transfer from the primary and it was overwhelming. A few weeks later after bottling, nothing. No idea how this helps but it will pass