- I brewed my AG#12 User Upper Bitter some weeks ago using a starter grown from WY1275 harvested in Jan 2019 (so the yeast is 2nd or 3rd generation)
- I then reused the yeast cake for my AG#13 Pale Ale - there was no break, I bottled one as I brewed the other (although I did swish out the yeast cake and transfer it to a different FV)
I left AG#12 in the bottle for 4 weeks at room temp - at bottling I'm sure it tasted fine, malty and bitter (though I'm now doubting this). When I came to try it I found I had a box full of gushers - every single one of 20 bottles. In the pic below you can see I released all the caps to let them vent before resealing them some hours later. 1 week later I tried another one - pretty flat but really not tasting great. If I was being positive I'd say at best it had a bit of a Belgian ale twang.
After fretting that all my subsequent brews would now be infected from bottling or something, last night I finally caved and tried a bottle of AG#13 which has been in the bottle 3 weeks at room temp. Well it wasn't a gusher - quite fizzy in the glass but nothing more. The taste was not foul as such but it didn't taste right - I've brewed this before (AG#1) and it just didn't taste at all like an EKG/Fuggles plae ale. Again I got a sense of a Belgian ale twang - I find it really hard to describe but there's a certain characteristic taste to Belgian ales that I'm not keen on.
(Happy ending, I also tried 2 bottles of my AG#14.1 & .2 American Wheat beers 2 weeks since bottling and they tasted great - so at least that suggests I haven't totally lost my mojo!)
So:
- Can anyone suggest might have gone wrong with AG#12 & 13? My best guess is some sort of mutation in the yeast giving me at best an undesired flavour. Is that possible? Is that a reasonable explanation? I used the same process as always at bottling so it's hard to believe I messed up at bottling with 2 totally different brews.
- What do I do with it? Seems hard to believe it could come right if I leave it in the bottle. I'm thinking keep maybe 5 of each just to see in the future and ditch the rest - painful, but what's more painful for me is I really don't understand what caused it.
Over to you guys!
Cheers,
Matt