Off-Flavor Experiment - Phenols In Contaminated Homebrewed Beer

hey it's john mike brewdashdudes.com and we are here outside and we're about to drink some beer mike brewed a beer he brought out two pint glasses and i can't wait to learn more about what i have here in front of us and then hopefully we can somehow teach and you know all learn together about this particular style can't wait to hear more about it nice so what is this so um lately i've been digging through big piles of old recipe sheets big piles and just going back through some brewing history and of what i've been what i've done over many years yep and i i remembered this beer and i found the recipe sheet for it and i used to brew a lot of ordinary bitter and best bitter yep things like that mostly ordinary bitter and so this is a best bitter that was an old recipe of mine that um i had brewed once a long time ago and i sort of enjoyed it and i realized you know what i got to come back to getting more of these beers because these are usually hyper drinkable super nice tasty beers um how old is this recipe is this what we're talking like 20 years this recipe is probably um is ten ten years definitely ten okay the um let me give you the quick breakdown so it's it's uh eighty-two percent golden promise it's a little over eight percent of carriston uh baird's charistam which is like a a light crystal malt yep about 35 lovabon and it's also eight percent torified wheat just to try to get some head retention and just a touch one percent of karafa special two to help with color adjustment uh the hops in here is just a 60-minute hop edition of admiral hops i've been i had someone that i'm using those up right so um so admiral at 60 minutes and then i'm sorry then there was another a one-ounce edition of the archer um with like 10 minutes to go just to give it that english hoppy character at the end um the original gravity in this beer was 10 48 and um we can talk about the finishing gravity so uh oh so this i pitched this she's got here b i pitched this um this is actually a re-pitch of the british ale yeast waist british elias that went into the that caveak and the stout stout comparison so it was just a re-pitch of that yeast okay and i fermented this at a very pleasant uh 68 degrees and towards the end i ramp it up i let it i let it get up to about two to finish not not a warm front you're stopping that with exactly right thanks so um this is the still has some a ways to clear up a little bit but i mean it's i think it's got the uh that breaded shoe you know hugh color there um and so tell me what you get um okay so um i'm not getting much uh hop aroma but it's uh there's a ready toasty quality there's a very toasty question on the nose um the first taste uh that i had um it seemed a little phenolic yeah and it says taste this so what happened i think this is um i'm gonna probably dump this out okay but i saved it well i saved it for this video because um the phenolic thing isn't super strong it's not like it doesn't hit you over the head right away but yeah but um it's pretty subtle it took me a while to convince myself that this beer had some level of contamination to it when i was tasting it and i don't exactly know where that came from because the stout that i took the east from as a re-pitch didn't have that still doesn't have it it's you know yeah and the gravity of that other beer has been pretty stable so i had to pick this up either in the the fermenter or somewhere in transferring or maybe when i harvested the yeast i didn't wasn't clean enough when i was harvesting the slug of yeast um i didn't use boiled and cooled water to sort of re-suspend some of the yeast cake you know but i've gotten away in the past yeah i think a key aspect i've gotten away in the past with just using uh i run my tap water for a bit first i let it run for like just 10 or 20 seconds and then i collect some of it and use that to resuspend yeast when i wanted to re-pitch i poured into a sanitized container maybe my container wasn't satisfied i was sort of rushing to get it into the keg so the interesting thing is the finishing gravity on this so another so the phenols at first i was wondering is it possible that it's stressed yeast from that hot ferment is it possible that no i'm not familiar with the archer admiral hop character i think these were all excuses in my mind to say it's not contaminated so how so the point of this beer to show everybody this beer is what how would you how do you what's another way to know that it's contaminated and the finishing gravity on this beer is 1.001 [Laughter] so it's pretty dry yeah the funny thing is for being a whole pound of carrot stand in here there really isn't much still there no um but the funny thing is getting down that low in gravity it's not like whoppingly contaminated it's just very subtle and you go oh there's some phenolics there yeah so i thought at least for us unfortunately people at home won't really get this but it is a pretty interesting lesson in convincing yourself that you are tasting what you're tasting i eventually just had to convince myself you know what that is a phenol it's not a weird hop thing it's not a yeast thing it is a phenol probably from some wild yeast contaminant because it's a very subtle you could if it wasn't this dark i could pass it you would almost pass it off as a uh a belgian pale ale right yeah it's it's it's a little bit like that um but you when you know it's not supposed to be there then you have to yeah so so the question so this this video is really about how do you know when your beer is contaminated right and you don't know for sure without doing some microbiology but if you use your taste and your perception this is what you get yeah and uh i think you're right um you you come up with like 10 excuses for why it tastes the way it is when probably you should probably stick with the most negative thing that could have happened yeah which is you rush the process yeah you know and you've gotten away with like you know cutting corners in the past and you're like yeah so people who say oh i've done this in the past or that and i've never been a problem and you know i've said to people eventually it catches up to you yeah this is an example where it caught up rushing a bit caught up to me and this one back when this one i i hate that because you get super confident yeah about it yeah and then it's like yeah so it had to have happened at the time it had to happen in the fermenter or the time of pitching yeast because it hasn't sat that long package wise to pick up to develop this and and cold too right so it really hasn't developed it's funny i was like trying to like off the nose try to pick up anything that's off you know because sometimes you can smell it yeah but nice it it has like it smells great it's right there it's right there yeah it's right there it's just that when you once you drink it you're like oh that's so there's something else so the interesting thing is i've um i've got all the ingredients to repeat this and a fresh pitch of the same yeast yeah i can't wait for that because i just want to i need this beer in my life i need a good yeah and i have to recover now i have to like i know exactly i know what i'm doing yeah i know what i'm doing i'm not cutting i just think i think for the for the channel or whatever i just think it's it's important to be like hey sometimes this happens and it's okay it's okay you just have to dump it out recover you know like all the facebook home brewing groups so there was that there i saw a post and this guy was actually i think it was a video of him like dumping his beer and he said this is the first time i've ever had to do this yeah and it's like well as a part of the hobby there's going to be that first time and then there you know hopefully there's not many times but you're going to have those times when you're just like you know what i have five gallons 10 gallons of a beer that just isn't great and you just got to feel good about it like all right throwing it out even if it's not starting you just realize this i just totally missed the mark on this recipe it's okay it's okay you know we do it again do it again that's the whole thing about the the whole practice yep you know it's like it's always you're always striving to get a little bit better each and every time now i'm sounding like some kind of yoga teacher i don't know what i'm saying um so thank you for this i think well i don't know where this fits in category is this um off flavor if i had a comparison this is an off flavor video is it a sanitation video it's not flavored i'm glad like like that when i first tasted it i was like all right i'm i'm hoping that uh what he's trying to like prove to me is that like there is something pop about it and i was like it's a bit phenomenal i can't tell you how many times i've pulled the sample and tasted it to try to convince myself i wasn't going crazy that it was because i really wanted this to to work out well you are certified sane friend uh that's uh phenolic beer all right well so that the lesson here and this is what you know i was saying is you know what we should take from this because you know we have had comments like oh thanks for sharing a video of like bad beer but the whole point of these kinds of videos we know this is bad beer yes and to learn from our silly mistakes you know that's the whole thing it's like we could have a whole channel where we like every beer we brew we drink it and we say like this is tremendous and you should you know love our videos because you know we brew only tremendous beer but i think that a lot of enough people have told us over the years like you guys tell it how it like like it is sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad sometimes it's just okay yep and certainly this is more on the bad side than just okay it's not horrible no it's not but it's just like right but if you told me like hey i made an ordinary barrier i'm like cool yeah i just kept telling myself you know what yeah the flavors are mostly there it's it's too dried out and it's just but it's just not great brood again i i think we've i think like if you look back at our history you'll see like i was like uh i brewed a pilsner i'm like i need a triumphant pilsner because i had a few attempts didn't hit the mark then hit the mark because i just went back to the drawing board adjusted whatever the heck i thought was wrong with the first attempt and then or second attempt and the third attempt was good so anyway brew on as they said brew on as they say who says that some goofball anyway you should check out our video about the uh the stout with english east and the cave with english uh we're sorry with uh sorry the style with convey east yep watch that video and you'll learn the origins the start of this particular beer thanks for watching a video like this if you like it regina mike brewdashews.com brew on cheers

Channel: Brew Dudes

Views: 8,085

Keywords: homebrewing, brewing beer, home brew, brewing beer at home, home brewing, brew dudes, these brew dudes, HBW, Homebrew Wednesday, Homebrew Weekly, off flavors in beer, off flavor experiment, off flavors phenols, phenolic beer, off flavors in homebrewed beer, contaminated beer, contaminated ordinary bitter, homebrew, beer, beer experiment

Id: tBCW2Wt1AGE

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020