All you Judges out there, am thinking of presenting this to my Brew club so we can identify them. What are the 4 off flavors mostly found in the beers you judge?
I plan to set up so we can taste them and learn the 4 most prominent ones and learn from that. If we do all of them it seems it will be harder to remember what they are, so I figure doing one at a time over and over again should improve our taste buds.
Agree with Dave on this one. Diacetyl (although I am a bit nose blind and taste blind to it, but have found a way to detect it better), DMS, phenols, get that one right away, and solventy. I also have a very sensitive palate to sulfur which I find in lagers that have not fermented out completely.
The warmer the climate you live in, the more you taste excessive fruity esters and phenols. That peach thing from US-05 is pretty common, as is the rotten fruit salad thing that about every English yeast gives you when fermented at around 78F – usually paired with a fine bouquet of fusels and sometimes “extract tang” from old LME.