Olan Suddeth is a good dude– honest, helpful, humble. These are just a few of the words I could come up with to describe my experiences with Olan over the last year or so. About a month ago, a post went up on his blog, HomeBrewDad, in which he shared a pretty crummy story, I recommend reading the article before proceeding. I contacted Olan, asked him if it’d be cool if I could do a video tasting of the beer, and he agreed.
The bottle conditioned beers arrived, beautifully labeled, and I threw them in the fridge to settle out. 36 hours later, I decided to do the tasting, which I approached with a bit of caution and, well… I’ll let the video say the rest.
I still have yet to to share the other 2 bottles with my friends, my schedule got the best of me, I’ll likely pull them out during our big 4th of July party this coming Friday and I fully trust they’ll be enjoyed. Cheers to Olan for being so courageous!
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7 thoughts on “Homebrew Tasting :: The Disaster Beer”
Thanks for the kind words. Hah… the beginning was funny, but when you said “no hiss”, I knew something was up. 🙂
I definitely agree with the overcarbonation comment. I carb my English beers a little more than the style dictates (I like it that way), but I’m thinking I didn’t get as good a mixture of the priming sugar as I thought, as I’ve had a few do like the one you opened – too much foam to start with.
As for the moniker “Winterfest” – it’s simply because I brewed this beer too late to call it an Oktoberfest. The first bottles weren’t ready until the end of January, so I called it a “winterfest” on the label, mostly because I’m a huge nerd.
The metallic observation is an interesting one. I wonder where that is coming from? Time to do some homework!
Thanks again for taking the time to review my beers.
Seriously, the metallic things was so incredibly subtle, nearly unnoticeable.
I thought a bit of metallic notes can be characteristic of lager yeast strains? I’ve had an octoberfest from a local brewery and picked up a slight metallic taste on it. Every other ale they make doesn’t have it, but their one lager does. Of course it could be something else entirely…
Could be slight oxidation, maybe? Depending on how it was treated when bottling, some O2 could be introduced.
I had a similar experience. I won the West Coast AHA regionals about 20 years ago in a few categories. My beer was bottle-conditioned and it was sent back East for the National finals. It was a disaster. The beers became gushers,soapy. I believe they were subjected to extreme heat during the voyage. I also think that, although my bottles/beers were very stable when kept cold after bottling and I used oxycaps, the shaking and heat from the travel caused oxidation. It is further possible/probable that SOMETHING.., was in each bottle that began re-fermentation, eg a bacteria/vinegar that started fermenting in the extreme conditions. It is possible to clean your bottles quite thoroughly yet it only takes one micro-organism floating around in your kitchen/garage to drop in before you put your cap on. It is also possible that your yeast sediment has a residual bacteria/vinegar that was kept in check due to yeast activity but activates under these conditions. I later switched to kegging and never had this problem again. as I used cp bottling. I would also reiterate that this only occurred when bottle-conditioned beers were shipped long distances.
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What’s interesting is Olan actually put the very same beer through a very extreme stress test and it still wasn’t soapy. Hmm.
I wonder if possibly his stress test was TOO stressful? Depending on how warm the bottles got, they may have been inadvertantly pasteurized. Might be if they get up to around 90-100F and stay there for a while, any lingering bacteria might be able to go crazy, but once you get up to 130/140, it might just kill of almost everything.