Brew Dudes

We have all had skunky beer in the past, right? What we wanted to do is really understand the effects of direct sunlight on a beer. Check out another one of Mike’s off-flavor experiments. This time, it’s light struck beer!

Light Struck Beer Experiment Details

So Mike took a liter and a half of his Pale Ale and transfer it to a plastic bottle topped with his carbonator cap. He left it in the sun for just 2 hours. When we opened it up, he didn’t think it was enough time to skunk the beer. Well, we were wrong.

Immediately after he poured the light struck beer into the glass, you could smell the skunky aroma. It followed through in the taste. There is no mistaking that flavor – it tasted as strong as it smelled.

Since the skunk aroma and flavor replaced the hops qualities in the original beer, the malty sweetness bled through underneath. It wasn’t detectable in the unaffected beer, but in the experiment better, it showed up pretty well.

Hope you like learning about these off-flavors as much we do. Mike was successful in ruining beer. I hope we will be better at detecting it in the future and know when to dump a beer.

Stay safe and brew on!

We have often talked about this subject off-camera and maybe a little on-camera too, but a way to understand off-flavors is to produce them yourself by doing all the things you were told not to do in homebrewing because you’d cause off-flavors. Mike did just that with this forced oxidation experiment with one of his beers.

Oxidized Beer Is Bad

With two glasses in front of me, I could tell right away that there was something different in the aroma of one of them. It smelled like sherry wine and it set off my brain to make a connection to the off-flavor of oxidized beer. The flavor followed suit.

There was a strong sherry taste that reminded me of barleywines that I have had. I would not say it tasted like wet cardboard as the texts say, but it was a pronounced sherry taste. Mike thought it was interesting that the hop character of the experiment beer was muted and the malt profile seemed more flabby.

We may try this beer again in a few more weeks to see how bad it can get. This experiment was eye-opening for me. Understanding off-flavors so that you can detect them in your beer is a good skill to have. Keep learning about your beer to become better homebrewers.

Brew ON!