Off taste (cidery/vinegary)

Hi all,

I've been brewing over a year, and while I've had some good results, I've run into several batches that have simply tasted off. Can't seem to get rid of a cidery flavor. Sometimes it's bad enough to have to dump the beer down the drain, and at other times it's at best barely drinkable. I batch prime, so I don't get why there would be a difference based on different bottles. I use the same cleaning and sanitation process for each bottle. Could it be the sugar? I use regular cane sugar. Yeast maybe? I use S-05. Infection? There's nothing nasty floating in it, but the beer is a little hazy in the bottle. Not to sound pathetic, but I'm on the verge of giving up and just buying good craft beers. I don't mind the money waste so much as putting in the time and effort only to come up with something undrinkable.

Thanks in advance for any ideas, an at this point I could use all the encouragement from those that have corrected their process and are making tasty brews!

"...

A complaint in the early days of modern homebrewing was that using table sugar in beer-making resulted in a "cidery" beer. The symptoms were that a beer made with table sugar that was added to the boil produced a cidery flavor that faded after several weeks in the bottle. Therefore the rule of thumb became 'avoid all table sugar'. While this is still a good idea when using malt extract, this old-(ale)wives tale is misleading. That defect most likely came from poor yeast due to a too low pitch, insufficient free-available-nitrogen, or a lack of other necessary yeast building materials in the wort. Table sugar can be used in small amounts with no harm and it is certainly cheaper to use for priming

..."

1. Make sure your yeast is good, did it sit too long in the fridge or the lhbs fridge? unlikely, but possible
2. Make sure you're pitching enough yeast for the beer and volume you're brewing. Make a starter, it won't hurt. There are starter calculators online.
3. aerate your wort before pitching the yeast. stir it like crazy after the wort has cooled down
4. make sure you ferment at the appropriate temperatures. does the temperature where you ferment fluctuate?
5. I've never needed it for any of my beers, but you can add a tea spoon or so of yeast nutrient to your wort if all else fails (assuming a 5 gallon batch, follow the manufacturer's instructions though).

As for the vinegar part of it, smelling like vinegar is one thing, but if it tastes like vinegar, then it's probably a acetobacter infection. Nothing you can do about that other than dump it or make vinegar out of it and use it for cooking.

If it's acetobacter, then you need to bleach-bomb all of your equipment to get rid of it, except for anything made of stainless steel, the bleach will ruin SS.

Thank you very much for the useful information! I'll give a couple things a try and see if that brings the taste back.