Buttery. This is the first time Ive tasted it and I know its becasue I rushed the beer. In my eagerness to brew I moved my ale too quickly off the yeast and didnt give it time to clean up. Just wanted to put this out here as a heads up to new brewers. Be patient or your beer will taste like butter and stuff.
You can try krausening…adding some actively fermenting wort to clean up the diacetyl. It’s worked for me in the past.
That is an unmistakable flavor. Once you taste it, you know. Sorry to hear about your beer.
Denny, thats a great idea. I would like to hear more about it if you have any information on how to go about doing that. Unfortunately, this batch is in the bottles so Im pretty sure its where its going to be. Its not terrible. Its just not good. I can drink it without being grossed out too bad anyway.
A member in my brew club had a diacetyl problem with a beer. He brought a few to a meeting so we could all taste… well, at least those of us who hadn’t tasted it before. If your beer is drinkable, your lucky. This beer was a complete waste. Tasted like someone added a few pounds of movie theater liquid butter at bottling.
Thats a bummer. Sounds much more gross than mine. The butter character is really just present enough to be noticed by me. I’d never recognized the flavor before because I keep good temps and give the yeast time so I was bummed on this one. It has good hop bitterness though, so its not a total loss. Ive got an oatmeal stout in secondary now that Im excited to get in bottles so I can forget this batch:)
Since it’s already bottled, you’d likely introduce worse problems by trying to fix it at this point. I’ve done it with kegged beer by adding a qt. of actively fermenting wort to the keg, then xferring the beer after the diacetyl reduction was complete. Are you sure the d is from xferring too early and not an infection? If it’s not an infection, it might get better as the bottles age. If it’s an infection, it’ll get worse.
Well Im nearly positive its not an infection. I have pretty good sanitation practices. I wasnt aware though that this flavor could come from infection. Im drinking one now and its not too bad. Fingers crossed for getting better in the bottle. Theoretically, shouldnt the priming sugar trigger a small fermentation and clean up diacetyl? Maybe? Is that what you are referring to?
I doubt the priming sugar would trigger enough fermentation to clean up the diacetyl, but ya never know.
Hm… bummer. Ok well heres to hoping. THanks for the help guys.
Denny, what kind of infection would cause diacetyl or diacetyl flavors?
Pediococcus is one.
