bad taste..cleaning...advice needed

Hello everyone. I have had reasonable success brewing thus far with only 14 batches under my belt. Two of those have been undrinkable. The first one was do to what I believe was unfiltered tap water. Once I started using a charcoal filter things started tasting good to even great. I was feeling pretty confident until I tasted a Blonde Ale I made. When I first tasted it, it can be described as plastic, or vinyl (see below). It was also very flat, so instead of being patient I took the bottles out of my 67-68 degree fermentation chest and shook each one up and put them in my beer storage cabinet which is 70-85 degrees. I tried another beer a week later after it sat in the fridge for 24 hours and it was like a volcano and still horrible. I tasted another one after 48-72 hours in the fridge and it was very flat once again and still tasted bad. Then a week later I had 2 explode in my storage cabinet……so I am sure I made some dumb rookie mistakes and I want to hear what those are. For the record I am doing all grain. My cleaning and sanitizing procedures are below….

I have narrowed down the taste to this from morebeer.com:

Chlorophenol
Tastes/Smells Like:
Plastic, Vinyl, Iodine
Possible Causes:
Using chlorinated tap water to brew or rinse equipment is the most common cause
for plastic-like or medicinal flavors. Medicinal flavors can also be the result of using
cleanser or sanitizer that is chlorine or iodine based. Some wild yeast will contribute
to a similar medicinal taste.
How to Avoid:
Don’t use chlorinated water to brew or to rinse equipment that will come into contact
with the beer. If chlorinated water must be used, use a water filter that removes
chlorine or boil the water for 15 minutes and then cool to room temperature to force
out any chlorine that may be present. Always use the recommended amount and
concentrations of sanitizers. Most sanitizers will not cause any off flavors when used
properly. When using bleach, use one-half ounce per gallon of water, let equipment
soak for 10 minutes and always rinse with sanitized (pre-boiled) water.

So here is my summary of procedures on brew day:

1) Heat strike water for mash that has gone through a charcoal filter.
2) Add 1+ gallons of hot tap water into cooler mash tun to warm it up for about 5-10 minutes, then swirl it and dump that water.
3) Add filtered strike water a tablespoon of pH stabilizer and grains.
4) Mash as normal. All water here on out is filtered.
5) Carboy sits for 1+ hours full of Star San
6) Rinse out kettle with unfiltered tap water before wort is transfered to mash tun.
Fast forward to end of boil.....
7) Cool wort within 20-25 minutes at the most.
8) Fill a large plastic tub with water from wort chiller to use later for cleaning (THIS IS UNFILTERED TAP WATER and a possible problem?)
9) Fast forward to cleaning. I clean everything right away (usually) with the water used from chilling the wort (unfiltered).
10) I let everything ari dry. My kettle I will dry with a towel to avoid spotting (stainless steel)

MISC INFO:
I use oxyclean to get the tough stuff out of carboys and hoses.
I re-use my Star San for awhile
Yeast used has been rinsed or washed as illustrated on the yeast washing sticky.


My thoughts? Your thoughts?
1) I have gotten a bit lazy in the cleaning and need to only use filtered water when rinsing equipment?
2) I have never tried PBW and maybe I should?
3) Dump my old hoses and start fresh (not a big expense)?
4) Something else that I am over looking that I need help on?
5) Should I post this issue in a different forum?

I really appreciate all the support and advice that I have gotten on here the past year. I still consider myself a beginner, but getting closer to kind of a beginner. I thank all of you in advance with your ideas on this.

-Cheers

I had the same flavors a few batches ago but I changed a handful of things all at once and it was fixed.

Here is what I changed:

1. Spring water from the grocery store instead of unfiltered tap water

2. StarSan instead iodine sanitizer

3. Temperature controlled kegerator set at 64 F instead of whatever my closet was.

I'm not sure which actually fixed it but my beers are phenomenally better now after these changes.

I also put everything through a PBW clean, rinse, and StarSan sanitize.

zmanzorro said:

I also put everything through a PBW clean, rinse, and StarSan sanitize.

Click to expand...

Did you do this right before the brew on brew day? Right after the brew day, or both? What kind of water did you use to clean? Filtered? Thanks.

I did this before I used each item. If I used it and set it down, it went back in the clean bucket, then rinse and so on.

I used unfiltered tap water in all three buckets.