Beer and Brewer Magazine

By Neal Cameron, Brewery Manager/Head Brewer, De Bortoli Wines Pty Ltd

Perhaps there is no greater enjoyment for the beer lover than that ephemeral moment of possibility before a potential ‘perfect beer' is opened. But so often, the glorious anticipation rapidly changes to disappointment, an affronted olfactory system and a cringing palate.

Rather than just screw up your face and mutter expletives, try to work out what went wrong by comparing what you taste with our common list of beer faults.

Aged/Oxidised

The best conditions for storing beer are short, short, short, cool and dark. Australia is big, big, big, hot and sunny. You do the math. Look for the best before date, buy fresh and if you see your favourite tipple cooking in the sun in your local drive-through, assume it has the beer equivalent of foot & mouth and leave well alone. Aged or oxidized beers are dull, with cardboardy/papery flavours, and any fresh hoppiness or maltiness will have been summarily dispatched. And if the beer doesn't have a best before date, then don't buy it
on principle.

Infection

Self-preservation is hard-wired into us; f you recoil in horror with the first smell or sip of a beer, then your finely tuned defense system is telling you something. Infections are oh-so-common in the home where a quick swill with the home-brand lemon scented bleach might not have cut the pediococcus. And sadly we've noted a few of our micro's occasionally put out a shocker for which there is little excuse. Unfortunately if it's a good place for yeast, it's a good place for about a million other organisms whose purpose is for evil rather than good. Vinegar, sour or harsh bitterness, cloudiness and just plain unpleasantness shows something is wrong.

Solvent

If you live anywhere north of Wonthaggi and brew in the summer without the aid of refrigeration, things may all happen a little oo quickly. If your brew smells like the wife's nail polish, this could be the cause. Hard-pressed yeast doesn't clean up after itself, nd ethyl acetate is amongst the trail it leaves. Keep it cool and slow.

Diacetyl

In a word, butterscotch. Now, as yet, we've never met a brewer that actually likes bottling, unless it's a matter of turning on a large and expensive machine. It's easy then to leave your beer sitting in the fermenter for a couple of weeks until you run out of excuses. Yeast euthanises when its glorious work is done and as it falls apart, it turns into a single-cell Pandora's Box with all sorts of unpleasantness running amok.

A week after fermentation is long enough, although ironically, racking off too early can leave diacetyl produced during fermentation un-scavenged. Oh, and a few anaerobic bacteria release the stuff too, so harder on the sanitizer please, especially during post fermentation activities.

Cloudy/Hazy

Leaving aside that all beers are born this way and some remain so intentionally, the clarity of the brew says much. For those of us that like our beers heavily dry-hopped, a milky haze speaks proudly of dispersed hop oils. For those of us that stupidly let our fridge run dry and have to resort to popping a few in the freezer, a beer chilled below the temperature it was filtered at will precipitate out proteins into a milky haze. No biggie so far; but an unexplained haze combined with a strange taste or aroma points towards the lemon-scented home brand bleach again. Pediococcus or lactic acid bacteria, perhaps a wild yeast infection would account for 95%. If you're able to take a look under a microscope, the culprit is normally pretty easy to spot. Oh, and if your wort's hazy prior to fermentation then chances are it'll remain that way; mash hard and boil hard.

Sulphur

Assuming we're all headed south at the end of our days, there's no reason to spend what little time we have sniffing sulphur in our beer. Eggs (H2S) or sweet corn (DMS) do not rank highly on the list of positive beer. The best of lager yeasts produce sulphur, but given time to relax they clean-up after themselves. Perhaps the most pernicious trait of DMS is that it masks many good aromas, particularly hop oils. Make sure you boil your regulation 5-10% loss, and keep sniffing your beer during maturation. You may find that a DMS problem suddenly lifts after a couple of weeks like the clouds parting at the beginning of a Simpsons episode.

Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts)