In my pea brain, it seems that hops have chlorophyll, and phenols, could is be possible under the right conditions to create chlorophenols that way?
No. Chlorophyll does not contain any chlorine atoms. The chloro in chlorophenols means chlorine. The chloro in chlorophyll means green.
Makes sense. Dumb question. I should Google before asking stuff like that.
Actually if you google something like that only you learn. If you ask it here we all get to learn something. I’m learning a ton reading the answers to other people’s questions.
Yes, Chlorine is named what it is, because it is a greenish yellow gas in its pure form.
I did some googling and found a wiki on phenols. Most of it over my head. But it says that one naturally occuring phenol is calll thymol, found in thyme. Also in some hops. One article mentioned a correlation between thymol and beta acid, and that it can be isomerized in low levels of ethanol (like when dry hopping?). There was a beekeeper forum that was talking about a pesticide for mites that contains thymol.
By the way, the article on thymol says that it is used as an antiseptic in some mouthwashes (chloroseptic I wonder?)
Once I used 4 oz of Mosaic dryhopped in an IPA and that beer was phenolic. Makes me wonder if they might be high in thymol, since there is no chlorine in my system.
What character did the phenols in the Mosaic beer have? When that has happened to me in the past, I’ve attributed it to wild yeast.
The active chemicals in many spices are toxic at high concentrations. The plants originally produced them as defense mechanisms, then we caught on that they are delicious. My wife uses eugenol at work to anesthetize fish. Eugenol is pure clove oil.
Its entirely possible it was contamination. I got a latex, medicinal, bandaid aroma and flavor from it. Denny tasted it, maybe he could elaborate
That’s a pretty good description, Jim. I pretty much doubt it was from the hops.
The primary antiseptic in Cloroseptic and Listerine is phenol. Just plain old, straight-up phenol. That’s where they get their medicinal taste. Other flavor compounds may be phenol-derivatives, but they don’t necessarily taste like phenol. Chemically, alcohol is much closer to acetic acid than something like thymol is to phenol, yet vodka tastes nothing like vinegar.
One of the active ingredients in listerine, IIRC.