Brewferm Tarwebier strange smell

[Orion1210]

Hi,

This tarwebier is my second go at homebrew, after a wherry kit. I brewed per instructions with candy sugar and bottled water in a snap lid bin without an airlock. Today i moved it out of primary after 9 days at 20degC into a secondary to dissolve priming sugar and then kegged half and bottled the rest. When i took a sample, it smelt acidic although not acetic, the sg was only 1.006. The smell improved once it had been moved into the keg. Tasted a little stale.

Should i be worried? Can it improve or only get worse? Does tarwebier normally have an unsual nose on it at this stage anyway?

I'm going to drill the lid for an airlock for next time so i can rule air contamination out in future!

Thanks

 

[Fender Precision]

Hi, I havnt brewed this one myself but would expect a complex brew like this to smell a bit stronger than most so no need to worry. I would leave this one to condition for a couple of months and the smell should be completely gone by then. This has happened to me with other brews especially higher gravity ales and while they sometimes take forever to become drinkable, they do come good in the end. :pray:

 

[Orion1210]

Thanks for the assurance! Does the sg sound ok? Or could this be down to a high alchol content?

 

[abeyptfc]

what was your starting gravity orion? if it has gone down as far as 1.006 then i expect it has fermented well and keeping your brew at a steady temp has helped.

 

[Orion1210]

I didn't take a starting sg tbh, but i found a few others reporting around 1.050. Will take one next brew!!

That sg would make it approx 5.7 abv before priming!!

Is there a rule of thumb to work out what the abv of the finished product will be, taking the priming sugar into account?

Cheers

 

[abeyptfc]

a wee 5.8% brew youve got there, not bad!party at orions!

 

[bobsbeer]

Keave it a while to mature. The taste will improve. Don't worry about contamination. All will be fine.

 

[artiums_enteri]

There are many aromas that constitute "off smells," so it's hard to determine what's going on without a little more detail. Are you getting green apple, acetone, sulphur, rotten egg, or strong alcohol? All of these can be a variation of fermentation problems caused by poor yeast health, fermenting too warm, or not a high enough pitch rate. The fact that you fermented in a vessel without an air lock tells me the gasses and chemicals produced by fermentation that normally blow off the beer got sucked back into the solution because they were trapped and had no where to go. I'd wager a guess and say you have a lot of byproducts of fermentation hanging around in the fermenter creating some funky smells. If you ever brew a lager and open the fermentation fridge during active fermentation it smells like a sulphur mine. These are gasses being expelled from the beer that should be blown off. They are not really desired in a brew.

 

[shearclass]

The fg is reasonable, there is quite a bit og sugar added to this brew, so not surprsing it has gone so low.

Mined finished at 1.012, and my og was 1.052. I drank a few of these fairly soon after carbonation, as I have read that wheat beers can be drank young. However, they didn't taste much like wheat beers, though they tasted ok.

FYI you will not get that good a carbonation in your keg as you will in your bottles. I assume you used the priming sugar stated in the instructions? This is 12 g per litre, which is pretty much as much as you would ever use to prime. The bottles will be able to withstand this much priming, but your keg will have a safety valve, and will release some of the CO2 when the pressure gets too strong.