Brew Dudes

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!

Yo – do you remember that lager I brewed with homegrown Magnum hops? Well, if you do remember, I brewed that beer using water right out of my tap. Mike wanted to try something. He said we could doctor the beer with brewing salts to see if we could learn something about their effects on the flavor of the finished beer. Watch this video to learn more about this experiment and what we learned.

The Experiment

Mike made up special suspensions/solutions using specific measurements of Calcium Sulfate and Calcium Chloride so we can add them to different samples of the beer I brewed. We had one as the control and added 100 PPM of CaCl₂ to one sample and 100 PPM of CaSO₄ to the other.

The Results

The sample that we put in Calcium Chloride in didn’t seem that much different. I guess you could say it was a bit more malty but because it was a SMaSH beer, there wasn’t much to manipulate. The Sulfate-affected beer sample was more noticeable. The bitterness became sharper and lingered longer in the aftertaste.

I think the results of this experiment made it clear that adding Calcium Sulfate ( CaSO₄ or Gypsum) to my brewing water is a needed step to brew quality lagers.

BREW ON!