Classic Band Aid/Medicinal Problem

[Snrub]

Hi All

AG brewer for nearly 3 years now, with a new problem I'd like some opinions on please?

In around my 3rd month of brewing I had a batch of Kolsch which on opening, was disgusting. I actually still have it cos I can't bring myself to chuck it, but it's still disgusting. It tastes medicinal, and because Palmer puts it in those terms, tastes of Band Aid. This was the first time I used a starter from wet yeast.

A couple of years on, my brewing career has gone well - some other periodic issues, but never that one again. And mainly excellent beer. However, in August I brewed a Cali Common, using a White Labs wet yeast to make a starter and pitch to the batch, and got a similar outcome. I put this down to the starter having not performed admirably, but me pitching it anyway alongside some rehydrated US-05.

Tonight I bottled an IPA based on a Gamma Ray clone recipe, and found that I have the same problem again, for the 2nd time in 3 months. Unacceptable! I can smell it as soon as I open the FV, and the taste is overwhelming. A few things then...

• I understand the common interpretation for this is chlorophenols. I use tap water for brewing with campden tablets to treat the water. I brew 30-35 litre batches, so using distilled water would be costly. I think I'm doing enough to eliminate chlorine.
• Due to the StarSan shortage, I started using ChemSan as my sanitiser at the back end of last year. It looks clear when I make the solution and I follow the dilution guidelines, though haven't tested the PH. I don't think I'm introducing chemicals that can react with the beer, but I'm concerned there's something I don't know enough about.
• I haven't replaced my silicon tuning for >12 months.
• I have around 8 FV's of varying ages, and some of them have seen better days, but the oldest is probably 2 years old. I brew once per month, 3 batches of 30 ish litres each, with each batch using 2 FV's.
• Due to having 6 FV's on the go most of the time, I don't have strict temp control on my fermentations. Mostly, it's room temperature, but this tends to be 18-22.
• For most batches, I keg half and bottle the rest. For my most recent batch, the problem is the same for both kegged and bottled beer.

Trying to diagnose the problem:

• If the commonly accepted wisdom is this problem arises from cleaners, I could change my cleaning practices. I use Sodium Percarbonate as an in-place cleaner, rinse like mad then sanitise, for both fermenters and bottles. What else should I do?
• Understanding the theory that this could be leeching from old plastics, I could replace my tubing and/or fermenters. But of course that comes at a cost.
• I need to control fermentation temperate accurately and properly for all my beers.

On all the above, the problem of course is to change one variable at a time to see how it impacts, whilst suffering lost batches of beer.

Any advice hugely welcomed.

 

[strange-steve]

Since you're treating your water with Campden tablets it's highly unlikely to be a chlorine issue. Another common cause of medical TCP flavour is a wild yeast or bacteria contamination. Unfortunately the off-flavour isn't going to get better so you're looking at a drain job I fear. Give all your cold side equipment a thorough clean with bleach, followed by a Campden solution rinse, then finally starsan/chemsan.

 

[samale]

Cleaner's is one option. Can I ask how do you cool your wort. What's your brewing process. From start to finish. How do you transfer your cold wort to the fermentor

 

[BeerCat]

I have had this in the past. The smell clings to the plastic and even after soaking it needed to sit in the sun to go. Never used tap water so i can rule that out.
I suspect its down to yeast stress? Do you control your temp? Only happened once since i use temp control in hundreds of batches and i pitched old yeast. If you pitch enough yeast it should out compete anything nasty.

 

[An Ankoù]

In my experience, this infection takes hold when pitching the yeast or shortly after. You need absolute cleanliness and sterile conditions when building a yeast starter or rehydrating a dried yeast. I boil up all my stuff in a large veg steamer for this. Its also important to pitch a strong batch of yeast.
Whether it comes from chlorinated water or from infection, once it's there you can't get rid of it and the beer's scrap.
Do as Steve says, above, to decontaminate your fermenters.

 

[Sadfield]

As @strange-steve advises.

What yeast did you use for the IPA? Could be something in your yeast preparation. I would pick the best fv and use that exclusively to eliminate one variable and direct pitch dry yeast for a good few batches and see if the problem disappears.

 

[Pennine]

Absolutely replace your tubing and then bleach or replace your fermenters if they are plastic. And clean the spigots really well or if you use a siphon or bottling wand replace them. I always go the nuclear approach with these things, it's not worth losing multiple batches when trying to figure out what's wrong.

I also have gotten this sporadically and always was when using mangrove jacks yeast. I think it has happened about 4 times in 200 batches. I have never gotten it from fermentis or llalemand products. I dont use liquid yeasts often but have also not had any issues with them, mainly Imperial & WHC. Í have only used White labs a coupe of times.

 

[terrym]

I suggest you try to eliminate one potential cause at a time. Pick the most likely cause from suggestions above, or the easiest to trial, and run with that first, then work your way through, especially if it means buying new kit.

 

[Sandimas]

I do get this occasionally, but haven't fully tracked it down. It's not all the time, hence the problem diagnosing it. I had it last back in the summer and that sinking feeling as soon as you open the FV and smell it, I think that was due to stressed yeast in the hot weather and not being able to get the brew cool enough.

Temperature control is really worth investing in, I like this time of year because the house is colder so I just need a garden trug and a fish tank heater to put the FV in, to keep the temp up. Summer is a problem in keeping the temp down unless you have a brewfridge.

I have a longer-standing issue with a very similar taste, but it develops over time if I keg my beers. I mainly bottle, and sometimes half bottle and half keg, from the same batch the bottles will be fine and the keg beer will start fine, but after 3-4 weeks the beer in the keg will develop a medicinal taste despite being under CO2 pressure. I've not managed to figure this one out, my kegs were fine for years then this suddenly started happening. I have bleached them and rinsed well, but it still happens.

 

[The-Engineer-That-Brews]

i take it your unaffected batches have no trace of it? If it were leeching from the plastics or some chemical cause then then one imagines you’d be getting a bit of it in everything. So it does sound like it‘s biological Or something in the ingredients (or the water). Even so, if it were that pernicious you’d expect it to be there all the time, so I’m not sure sterilising the heck out of everything is necessarily going to help either. You have my sympathy it must be very frustrating!

 

[An Ankoù]

i take it your unaffected batches have no trace of it? If it were leeching from the plastics or some chemical cause then then one imagines you’d be getting a bit of it in everything. So it does sound like it‘s biological Or something in the ingredients (or the water). Even so, if it were that pernicious you’d expect it to be there all the time, so I’m not sure sterilising the heck out of everything is necessarily going to help either. You have my sympathy it must be very frustrating!

I agree that it's unlikely to be something leeching from the plastic. I'm not convinced that syphoning tubes degrade to such an extent that they can taint the beer, either. It's not the water as the OP treats it to eliminate chlorine, so that only leaves infection or the yeast itself. I've had it twice in the last two years, the first time was with a very old pack of Wyeast Denny's favourite, which I had difficulty making a starter from and I really should have chucked, and the second was from a recultured batch of something, I can't remember what. In both cases, I noticed that fermentation slowed down and the beer looked somewhat murkier than otherwise. Adding some nutrient speeded up the fermentation again, but the taste of chlorophenols, once there, stays forever. I'm at a loss to know whether it was infection or yeast stress. My yeast culturing and growing conditions are by no means sloppy although I don't have a special area for this and so infections might be airborne. I now rehydrate all powdered yeasts and I build a starter from all liquid yeasts regardless of how fresh they are. If I reculture yeast I don't go further than third generation. I've haven't had a bad batch for about a year now.
My advice to @Snrub would be to thoroughly clean everything that was contaminated by whatever nuclear option you've got- bleach would be my choice, followed by gamma irradiation and a good rinsing with metabusulphite solution. I've always been distrustful of no-rinse products. The age of tubes and fermenters has never been an issue if they're kept clean; much of my stuff is well over 20 years old and going strong.

I was joking about the gamma irradiation. Keep in mind what happened to Bruce Banner when he tried it!

 

[Sadfield]

I was joking about the gamma irradiation. Keep in mind what happened to Bruce Banner when he tried it!

Yeah, but he was never angry about his beer though.

 

[Alastair70]

I had a similar issue with a Kolsh earlier this year. I put it down to yeast stress. I used the Lallemand Kolsh and the fermentation ran warmer than the 18C that recommended for the first 4 days. It mellowed a bit after 6 weeks but I ended up chucking the last 5L or so.

 

[strange-steve]

There are some suggestions that it might be due to yeast stress, but as far as I'm aware yeast cannot produce phenols (which are the cause of medicinal flavours) unless it is a POF+ (phenolic off-flavour) strain no matter how stressed it is. These strains are typically the spicy/peppery/clovey Belgian and hefeweizen yeasts, as well as some brett and wild yeast strains. I'm pretty sure kolsch isn't a POF+ strain.

 

[Alastair70]

There are some suggestions that it might be due to yeast stress, but as far as I'm aware yeast cannot produce phenols (which are the cause of medicinal flavours) unless it is a POF+ (phenolic off-flavour) strain no matter how stressed it is. These strains are typically the spicy/peppery/clovey Belgian and hefeweizen yeasts, as well as some brett and wild yeast strains. I'm pretty sure kolsch isn't a POF+ strain.

Good to know, thank you. Fortunately the APA that I'm conditioning at the minute hasn't been affected by whatever happened to the Kolsh.

 

[Sadfield]

There are some suggestions that it might be due to yeast stress, but as far as I'm aware yeast cannot produce phenols (which are the cause of medicinal flavours) unless it is a POF+ (phenolic off-flavour) strain no matter how stressed it is. These strains are typically the spicy/peppery/clovey Belgian and hefeweizen yeasts, as well as some brett and wild yeast strains. I'm pretty sure kolsch isn't a POF+ strain.

My thoughts too.

 

[An Ankoù]

There are some suggestions that it might be due to yeast stress, but as far as I'm aware yeast cannot produce phenols (which are the cause of medicinal flavours) unless it is a POF+ (phenolic off-flavour) strain no matter how stressed it is. These strains are typically the spicy/peppery/clovey Belgian and hefeweizen yeasts, as well as some brett and wild yeast strains. I'm pretty sure kolsch isn't a POF+ strain.

Indeed. And this particular off flavour whiffs of chlorophenols to my delicate hooter. Unlikely the chlorine would come from calcium or sodium chloride in the wort so maybe it's a coincidence it smells like that. It's certainly not the kind of flavour you would welcome in, say, a German or Belgian wheat beer.

 

[pilgrimhudd]

I had this and although I was hoping it was due to chlorine i'm pretty sure it was infected and I narrowed it down to my bottling bucket tap. I lost 3 brews due to this and almost lost faith in brewing altogether! I would clean all the cold side equipment as someone else said, change the siphon tubing and chuck the contaminated beer.

 

[samale]

I

I had this and although I was hoping it was due to chlorine i'm pretty sure it was infected and I narrowed it down to my bottling bucket tap. I lost 3 brews due to this and almost lost faith in brewing altogether! I would clean all the cold side equipment as someone else said, change the siphon tubing and chuck the contaminated beer.

I have had it earlier when I started of brewing. It's definitely cold side. A good soak with bleach and take apart your tap

 

[Snrub]

Thanks so much for the replies - plenty of food for thought!

First to answer specific questions asked:

@samale - cooling is via an immersion chiller, but not all of the affected batches were chilled this way, some were left to cool ambiently.

@BeerCat - I don't control temp, but have an area of the house which is fairly reliably 18-20 ambient. It's done the job well enough for a few years. I actually bought a 2nd hand freezer last week which will take 4 FV's, so looking forward to hooking that up to an inkbird.

@Sadtenchez - there may be something to work on here, cheers. Last couple of times I've used dried I've picked a bowl out of the cupboard and used that. Starters are done in a sanitised Erlingmeyer flask. The 2 most recent affected batches were one of each method. So while I don't think that's the cause, I need to improve it.

@darrellm and @The-Engineer-That-Brews - this is definitely an 'all or nothing' problem. There were 2 batches between these two affected batches which had no trace of the problem and were superb. I just can't say for sure whether they used the same FV's, and both were darker beers which tend to mask these problems better.

@An Ankoù I'm going to adopt your healthy distrust of the sanitiser.

Collectively, you've convinced me that it's not residual chlorine or yeast stress, so I'm left with either an infection or a reaction with my cleaning regime.

So here's my plan, based on your advice:

1. I'm going to buy 2 new fermenters, as some are probably past their best anyway. next batch, I'll use one new and one old to spread the risk.

2. I'll follow @strange-steve's advice to the letter with the 'old' fermenters.

3. I'm introducing proper temp control anyway.

4. Will double up on sanitation for yeast prep.

5. I'll replace by PVC tubing for good measure.

I now need to bring myself to chuck around 120 bottles of beer down the sink. It's times like these I wish my daughter was old enough to throw a party where the only goal is to get sh*tfaced, though I suspect even desperate teenagers wouldn't sup this lot.

A last question - given infection is a possible cause, would you keep the bottles? I'm not sure I can really be arsed to clean all of these with bleach, together with the accompanying rinsing. I probably have enough unsullied in reserve.

I'll report back - thanks again everyone for the advice. Hugely appreciated :)