Off Flavor in Mutliple Batches

[Northshore]

I have had been running into some issues with off flavors on my last couple batches and I am having a real hard time pinning down where things are going wrong in the process. The off-flavor itself is even difficult to nail down but it is definitely not right. If I had to guess, I would say that it is a phenol of some sort. I am trying to isolate where things have gone wrong and whether or not it is related to the fermentation or the packaging. I am leaning towards a mild contamination from the bottling process because my last batch tasted fantastic on bottling day but after conditioning and carbonating, something was amiss.

As of late I have been doing 2.5 G batch dry hopped pale ales and bottling directly from my fermenter. Historically I would do it the way I always have for almost 25 years ago - glass primary, glass secondary and plastic bottling bucket with priming solution blended in on packaging day. Each transfer auto-siphoned, or worse, started with mouth suction! Oxygen ingress be damned and I never had an off-flavor or contamination over the years!

I have been tweaking the process recently so that I could minimize oxygen ingress on my hoppy beers and the potential for infections. Ironically this has had an inverse outcome. With the removal of a secondary, I tend to bottle sooner so as to get the beer off the yeast cake and dry hops. For reference, my last batch used 1.2 oz. of Lupomax Citra in the dry hop which was added on day 5. I then purged the headspace the best I could with some CO2 via the airlock port. On day 16 I bottled directly from my Spiedel 20L fermenter into bottles via a bottling wand and small piece of tubing attached to the spigot. I do not cold crash prior to bottling either. I prime with a syringe and mixed sugar solution into each bottle.


Methods:

• Submerge bottles into a bucket of Star San to fill and then let them sit in the sink for a few minutes before emptying the Star San back into a bucket
• Let tubing, bottling wand and syringe soak in the bucket of Star San. All of these were new last time around.
• Boil water and pour a measured amount into a pyrex measuring cup that conatins a weighed amount of priming sugar. Wondering if this is a potential issue because I do not boil the sugar at the same time?
• When doing the actual bottling, I have a cup of StarSan alongside my priming solution and I dose about 6 bottles at a time and put the syringe into the sanitizer between doses. Fill each bottle with the wand and then cap.
• The caps are put on a tray and sprayed with sanitizer a couple minutes before I cap each bottle. This was another step that had me wondering if it could be problematic.
• I have even become so paranoid that I drop a quarter of a Campden tablet into my sanitizing water because we have chloramine in our water system. This has to be overkill but as I said, I am paranoid.

If any obvious issues come to mind, I am all ears. For my next batch, I am considering going back to my old process that employees a secondary and a bottling bucket for starters because it worked pretty well.

 

[Nosybear]

Phenol: Are you on a municipal water system? If so, dechlorinate your water before brewing with it. 1/2 Campden tablet will dechlorinate 10 gallons of water. Whatever else you try, try that, it's cheap and if not needed, harmless.
Also phenol: Break everything down, clean it until it squeaks, then disinfect it with a mild (1tbsp/gallon) bleach solution, rinse and reassemble. The mild off-flavor you describe could be a speck of infected grime somewhere in your system.
The chloramine in your sanitizer will not cause the problem; however, if you mix your star-san with distilled or RO water, it will last nearly forever. Something to consider....
Oxygen will not cause a phenolic flavor, that's barking up the wrong tree for this problem.
Bottom line, to get phenolics you have to either have chlorine in your brewing liquor, an infection or, or smoked malt or scorching.

 

[Northshore]

I typically pour my tap water the night before, add 1/2 campden and let it sit to take of chlorine and/or chloramine.

To your second point, I am prepared to clean everything as you suggest. I was just down in my basement staring at all my equipment trying to surmise where this problem is emmanating. I was taking a closer look at my fermenter and thinking that I have never have actually taken apart the spigot on the fermenter. I soak and rinse it all while assembled but that is all. With a little effort, I was able to break it down into pieces so this is a good starting point but I am prepared to this with everything on the cold side.

You mention scorching. I do BIAB and have at times had to add some heat to the kettle during mashing although I am careful because I don't want to torch my mesh bag. How much heat would constitute a scorching so that I would extract phenols?

 

[Bulin's Milker Bucket Brews]

Possible infection? I'd bleach the living heck out of EVERYTHING that touches or even gets close to your grain/wort/beer. Your regular method decribed in your post above will neutralize any residual chlorine. The bleach should kill any contaminants(assuming residue free surfaces).

I flush with chlorine, neutralize with acid after every brew.

 

[Donoroto]

Scortch comes from spot heat, something over about 190 F. Leaves a burnt or sweet flavor.