Last week I tasted the beer that I had put up to ferment a couple of weeks before that. Here is the result:
Yeah. That bad.
Stinkzoid.
The beer tasted so bad that I just put the cap back on it and left it. I did not bottle it. What a disappointment. I decided to leave it in the carboy for a week and then taste it again to see if it was still horrid.
Basically, I procrastinated on throwing it out.
So Friday evening I tasted it again. Still horrid. Acidy. Bitter. Nasty. Dang.
I was going to throw it out on Saturday, but on a whim I put some of it in a bottle and took it to the store where I buy my ingredients to ask the experts what they thought about the taste…. before I threw it out.
One of them smelled it and said, “Hmmm. Smells delicious”.
Then he tasted it and made a face and said, “Eww”.
That’s a quote…”Eww”.
We all pondered it for a while. The beer guys said that it tasted bad, but it did not smell bad, so it is probably not a bacterial infection. The flavors they came up with were “soap” and “green apple” and “sour”….. (tempted yet?). They thought that it was some “off flavors” in the beer, not really sour beer. Off flavors? More like “way off” flavors. “Off the chart” flavors.
Then they suggested that I rack if off of the sediment into another container and let it sit for a couple of weeks. Sometimes off flavors like that will straighten themselves out over time. If it is still nasty in a few weeks, then I can throw it out.
So that is what I did today. I racked (siphoned) the beer into my brew bucket (not to be confused with Dad’s Beer Bucket), scrubbed the carboy clean, sanitized the carboy, and then racked it back into the carboy.
Here is a photo of the siphon working to move the beer from the brew bucket back into the carboy.
Notice the soap suds in the carboy?
That is foam from the new sanitizer that they sold me called “Star San”. It foams up like that. Here is a better photo of the suds.
The Star San instructions say that it will foam up, just ignore the foam and don’t rinse it.
OK fine then. That is what I did. Now I have soap suds in my beer.
Hey! Want to come over to try some of my home brewed beer?
Didn’t think so.