derekp83
Well-Known Member
Just as the title asks, did I ruin my batch of beer? I recently made a pale ale recipe with some white wheat malt (only 6% of the grain bill) and let it ferment in a 2 gallon Mr. Beer barrel. I let it naturally cool and in the morning (less than 12 hours later) pitched a leftover packet of Muntons yeast from a prehopped kit. It's a 2 gallon batch, so 7 grams is plenty of yeast. I then kept the barrel in a cooler with very cold water and that typically stayed around 60-65 F for 3-4 days and gradually crept up to 68-70 F by the end of the week. I took it out of the cooler once I noticed some mold spores on the outside of the barrel. There's no reason that I can tell that the spores got into the beer, however.
Bottled the brew yesterday and noticed it smells like a wheat beer, oddly enough. The taste from the hydrometer was not pleasant. I tasted iron or blood, or as some suggest, old pennies. Very bitter, but I'm hoping that's just because the hydrometer reading came straight from the sanitized spigot so a lot of yeast came with it. Maybe it's a bacterial contamination in the brew, but I don't see why I would be getting phenols and other hefeweizen type aromas when the beer was cool during primary fermentation. Thoughts?
Thanks!
Bottled the brew yesterday and noticed it smells like a wheat beer, oddly enough. The taste from the hydrometer was not pleasant. I tasted iron or blood, or as some suggest, old pennies. Very bitter, but I'm hoping that's just because the hydrometer reading came straight from the sanitized spigot so a lot of yeast came with it. Maybe it's a bacterial contamination in the brew, but I don't see why I would be getting phenols and other hefeweizen type aromas when the beer was cool during primary fermentation. Thoughts?
Thanks!