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- Jan 3, 2016
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I have had been running into some issues with off flavors on my last couple batches and I am having a real hard time pinning down where things are going wrong in the process. The off-flavor itself is even difficult to nail down but it is definitely not right. If I had to guess, I would say that it is a phenol of some sort. I am trying to isolate where things have gone wrong and whether or not it is related to the fermentation or the packaging. I am leaning towards a mild contamination from the bottling process because my last batch tasted fantastic on bottling day but after conditioning and carbonating, something was amiss.
As of late I have been doing 2.5 G batch dry hopped pale ales and bottling directly from my fermenter. Historically I would do it the way I always have for almost 25 years ago - glass primary, glass secondary and plastic bottling bucket with priming solution blended in on packaging day. Each transfer auto-siphoned, or worse, started with mouth suction! Oxygen ingress be damned and I never had an off-flavor or contamination over the years!
I have been tweaking the process recently so that I could minimize oxygen ingress on my hoppy beers and the potential for infections. Ironically this has had an inverse outcome. With the removal of a secondary, I tend to bottle sooner so as to get the beer off the yeast cake and dry hops. For reference, my last batch used 1.2 oz. of Lupomax Citra in the dry hop which was added on day 5. I then purged the headspace the best I could with some CO2 via the airlock port. On day 16 I bottled directly from my Spiedel 20L fermenter into bottles via a bottling wand and small piece of tubing attached to the spigot. I do not cold crash prior to bottling either. I prime with a syringe and mixed sugar solution into each bottle.
Methods:
If any obvious issues come to mind, I am all ears. For my next batch, I am considering going back to my old process that employees a secondary and a bottling bucket for starters because it worked pretty well.
As of late I have been doing 2.5 G batch dry hopped pale ales and bottling directly from my fermenter. Historically I would do it the way I always have for almost 25 years ago - glass primary, glass secondary and plastic bottling bucket with priming solution blended in on packaging day. Each transfer auto-siphoned, or worse, started with mouth suction! Oxygen ingress be damned and I never had an off-flavor or contamination over the years!
I have been tweaking the process recently so that I could minimize oxygen ingress on my hoppy beers and the potential for infections. Ironically this has had an inverse outcome. With the removal of a secondary, I tend to bottle sooner so as to get the beer off the yeast cake and dry hops. For reference, my last batch used 1.2 oz. of Lupomax Citra in the dry hop which was added on day 5. I then purged the headspace the best I could with some CO2 via the airlock port. On day 16 I bottled directly from my Spiedel 20L fermenter into bottles via a bottling wand and small piece of tubing attached to the spigot. I do not cold crash prior to bottling either. I prime with a syringe and mixed sugar solution into each bottle.
Methods:
- Submerge bottles into a bucket of Star San to fill and then let them sit in the sink for a few minutes before emptying the Star San back into a bucket
- Let tubing, bottling wand and syringe soak in the bucket of Star San. All of these were new last time around.
- Boil water and pour a measured amount into a pyrex measuring cup that conatins a weighed amount of priming sugar. Wondering if this is a potential issue because I do not boil the sugar at the same time?
- When doing the actual bottling, I have a cup of StarSan alongside my priming solution and I dose about 6 bottles at a time and put the syringe into the sanitizer between doses. Fill each bottle with the wand and then cap.
- The caps are put on a tray and sprayed with sanitizer a couple minutes before I cap each bottle. This was another step that had me wondering if it could be problematic.
- I have even become so paranoid that I drop a quarter of a Campden tablet into my sanitizing water because we have chloramine in our water system. This has to be overkill but as I said, I am paranoid.
If any obvious issues come to mind, I am all ears. For my next batch, I am considering going back to my old process that employees a secondary and a bottling bucket for starters because it worked pretty well.
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