Hi strangers! It’s been a busy time around the house with the newborn and no homebrewing consequently. I did get some scores back from a recent competition where I scored a 25 :o and a 37 (IPA that made it to the second round).
The Pale Ale that got terrible marks had numerous remarks around a phenolic off flavor (smoky/plastic). Two score sheets said the same thing (although I’ve been told judges score together so perhaps they influence each other).
While I’m not the best taster, I don’t get this flavor at all. What is usually the main culprit for this off-flavor? I don’t think my equipment or sanitation would be to blame as I’ve used the same stuff for other entries. Regarding my water (I saw notes about checking for chlorine), I only use RO/ Distilled and a mixture of filtered tap.
Yeast- WLP001 w/ starter
Mashed at 153, normally my sparge water is around 185 or so.
You know I want to say it does, although for this purpose I bypass the water softener and run it through a Brita filter. Maybe it doesn’t. I may just stick with R/O for now or donate another $30 to Ward Labs!
I can’t be certain, but I believe I used the same water setup for my IPA that scored a 37. Maybe the hops (Zombie Dust clone) dominated that one so they didn’t pick anything up? The low scorer was a SN Pale Ale clone.
Maybe you should send the same beer to a second contest. See if different judges detect the same taste issue before you fix a phantom that you can’t taste.
Also, could you have a packaging problem? Beer can change between bottling day and contest day.
Perhaps…I packaged the same as the other beer. It was a mess though, I was jury rigging some silicone tubing onto my Perlick taps and it kept shooting the tubing off. I need a better system at some point!
I have bottled beer and kept it in my fridge for weeks and months with no problems. Then on a few occasions I have shipped beer to contests and had reports of geysers, gray beer, and other likely packaging issues.
I think when the bottles warm up in shipping and or storage at the contest site the bugs in the bottle wake up.
Bottle one from the tap and leave it at room temp for a few weeks, then open and taste it. That’ll tell you if you need to clean your lines. I’ve had some issues with that in the past for comps.
Up until about 6 mos ago I used to use my tap water and treat it with campden tablets (or potassium metabisulfate powder) to eliminate chloramines in my municipal water supply. Even with doing that I would still occasionally pick up some plasticy aroma/tastes that even some experienced judges detected in competitions. Since then I have been using straight RO water with no issues whatsoever.
The lines would surprise me, I splurged for the EJ Beverage silver lined, titanium and platinum lines. Additionally, I haven’t had beer running through them that long. I do run hot PBW followed by clean water through the lines each time I switch out the kegs.
