I brewed a West Coast IPA not too long ago, bottled it, and have since cracked open a few of them. They are terrible.
I live in Southern California and as of right now I have no way of controlling the temperature in my fermentation closet. My beer was fermenting above 80° almost everyday for a couple of weeks. From another thread I posted I have gotten a few responses saying that this extreme temperature could have caused the off flavors.
I am wondering how many here have brewed a batch, tasted it, didn’t like it, and cracked open all the bottles and poured them out? I have at least 40 bottles of the stuff left, but I prefer drinking the few remaining Bud Lights left over from a beach party last weekend. How many of you have had a similar situation and cut your losses and dumped it? Or how many of you sucked it up and drink em?
I don’t drink beer I don’t like - mine or bought. We’ve most all dumped at some point. Use it as a learning experience. The next batch will be better !
I still do on occasion. And it’s not just for bad beers. If something is “just OK” and I need the keg/bottle space, then down the drain it goes. I enjoy the brewing part as much as the drinking. That’s part of the reason why I started brewing smaller batches.
I found that once you get over the guilt of dumping batches you become a better brewer.
Definitely nothing wrong with dumping the batch, but unless you need the bottles right now I don’t see any reason not to sit on it for a couple months and see what happens.
Almost every homebrewer has dumped at least one batch. It just happens for one reason or another that a batch didn’t turn out and you don’t want to drink it.
I agree that if you have the room hang on to the bottles and see what happens.
Some never recover, but some do! If it is badly infected, given the hop content, I doubt that it will recover to be a good beer, but since it is bottled, I would keep it for a while and see. Maybe it will be the next great sour!
honestly I dump as much beer as I drink, as I like brewing more than drinking, and the beer gets old.
(#1 consumer is neither me nor the drain, but my boss.) ;D
Udubdawg, sounds like you need to brew smaller batches.
OP, dump it and be done with it. Nothing wrong with dumping beer as long as you learned something from it, which it seems you have. I dumped a whole keg of oatmeal stout last winter…that was sad. Pitched some bad yeast, I think. It had a whiskey-like flavor in it, but there was no whiskey added and it fermented at 64. I can only think the yeast was bad or it picked up some kind of infection. That was very disappointing.
Dumped about 1-2 gallons out of 3 different kegs this morning. No big deal. It was stuff that was mediocre at its best, now it is old, and I want something else in those kegs. I brew a lot… too much probably:) But, I like brewing and usually have 6+ on tap at a time. If something is mediocre to not great… it just never gets drank and some portion of it will hit the drain eventually. I would never choke down beer that was not good just to “never dump a beer.” Brew on.
If you were only allowed 200 gallons per year brewed AND consumed, would you then keep uggy beers? I wouldn’t. And I don’t. Its not very often, but I don’t keep meh beer laying around
Thanks, guys for all your responses. I don’t need the bottles right now as I will not brew again until I buy or build a fermentation cooler. That being said, I will sit on these for a little while. Very disappointing as I was expecting these not to last very long from the initial smells during fermentation. The smell was delicious. So hoppy. So good.
