Off Flavor Workshop

Ever wonder what that off flavor is in your beer? Ever take one sip and wonder if you can return this beer because it just doesn't taste right?

I have ordered a beer, taken a sip and wondered what in the world I was going to do with a whole pour of this...how am I going to drink it all?  It just doesn't taste good to me--something must be wrong with it.

But then I've also wondered if I was going crazy, or if my tastebuds were off, or if I had just eaten something weird that day that made the beers taste funny, because everyone else seemed to like it or I liked it last time I had it.  It's not true that your palate is static. Our preferences and our judgments change all the time, based on experience, time of year, what you ate that day, what else you drank that day, or even whether or not your allergies are acting up.   All of these factors make it difficult to really tell if your beer is truly infected.

A big issue too is just personal preference.  I know some people are absolutely horrified by grassy off flavors in old hops. I know others are so sensitive to diacetyl that even just a touch of it ruins a beer for them.

I have tasted off flavors in beer, but I've often chalked it up to personal preference. I'll say that I don't like that one because it's a little too buttery and rich for my palate; I prefer crisp and bitter to sweet or buttery. Did that beer taste a little like green apples?  Maybe, but I like green Jolly Ranchers, so why is that a bad thing?

Off flavors in beer can be subtle or obvious, horrible or simply interesting, catastrophic or part of the style.  It's hard to tell when to draw the line.

Enter the Cicerone off flavor workshop. There used to be a kit you could buy from cicerone.org for $50, but when I double checked before writing this post, it seems it only comes with a webinar now (which really is a good thing for explanation and guidance) but boosts the cost to $150 for a 6 person webinar.

Regardless, I was fortunate enough to have a local Cicerone lead an off flavor workshop at a restaurant/beer bar not half a mile from my house, so I couldn't pass up the opportunity.  I signed up for a lovely $48 ticket that included the workshop and some food and arrived with my notebook and a pen, eager to learn what I should NOT be tasting in your beer.

Having taken the Cicerone beer server test and been around plenty of homebrewers and experimental professional brewers, I've tasted some off flavors over the years. I was hoping this workshop was going to help me use professional jargon to put a finger on why some beers just didn't seem to work.

The workshop consisted of 5 pairs of beers. One of each pairing was "good" and the other of the pair was "flawed." We were told we would cover skunked beer (on a lager), diacetyl (on a different lager), DNS on a brown ale, acetaldehyde on a brown ale, and oxidization on a pale ale.  Each flawed beer was supposed to be dramatically affected so that we could tell the difference easily between the two.  The process led to some interesting observations.

Line up of the pairs of beers

Lesson learned #1: Some styles are SUPPOSED to have those flavors. If you're sensitive to diacetyl, then you're naturally going to have an aversion to some ales, especially ones that drink like chardonnays, or some Czech lagers--so say the experts (see this description or this one).  This was news to me. While I've never liked chardonnay, I didn't know it was the buttery flavor that was off putting to me. The same is true with DMS, dimethyl sulfide, which everyone kept describing as creamed corn.  Some levels of DMS are acceptable in lagers, minimally (says home brewers association).  What alarmed me was the idea that tasting these flavors in some styles is acceptable but tasting them in others was unacceptable, which harkens back to my post about the BJCP style parameters in your Certified Beer Server testing--you better learn those rules! This was one situation where I was very glad I had already completed that test.

Lesson learned #2: You can't taste every off flavor. Or maybe you can, but I can't. But that's ok, I guess.  Each person has a palate that is naturally or environmentally tuned to certain flavors. I personally do not enjoy saffron in anything. It's just my palate. Similarly, I apparently cannot taste acetaldehyde.  That's the off flavor that everyone was saying tasted like green apples in your beer.  When we had the "correct" beer next to the "flawed" beer, and we were supposed to taste the difference, I was stumped. I could tell that one was slightly different from the other, but without prompting I would never have come up with "green apples." And as I previously mentioned, I like green Jolly Ranchers and a lot of sour beers so I'm not sure I could find this offensive even if it was in a style it wasn't supposed to be in.  I did feel like I was failing some sort of palate test here, but I've come to accept that without further training, I'm not likely to overcome my palate's natural tendencies.

Lesson learned #3: Having someone else describe a flavor to you is like having someone describe a painting you can't see. You can get the general gist of the thing, but you really learn more about the person doing the describing than what's being described.  At the end of the workshop, we were given 4 beers that were not affected in any way, but the workshop leader was asking us to describe the flavors.  Half the room hated the hefe given to us, claiming all sorts of combinations of off flavors, but the other half of the room despised the sour, claiming a variety of infections.  There was even disagreement on a barrel aged stout, with multiple attempts to explain where the brewer went wrong. With all these previous categories of flaws in our heads, we just didn't imagine that all these beers were actually brewed to style and weren't flawed in any way.  Have you ever imagined what it would be like to describe the color red to someone who has never seen red?  What if the red we're looking at looks like a blue-red to me, but an orange-red to you? Is there a definitive way to define which one of us has a more accurate experience of that shade of red? It's the same with off-flavors--my orange-red is buttery and what I really wanted was a blue-red crisp IPA.  Can my description of the off flavor accurately describe my experience and convince you, who may like the beer, that it's actually flawed?  Maybe, with beer, there is a way to use description as evidence to someone who can't taste it. But the existentialist in me thinks that maybe there isn't. 

All in all, off flavor kits or workshops are a great idea. I think we really need them to know what we mean when we hear "buttery" or "grassy" or "skunky." However, we also need to not take the flavors the kit creates as the definitive answer of what makes a beer flawed or not or use the standard descriptive words to immediately mean flawed. Clearly, there are a million ways a beer can go wrong, and a million ways a beer can go right and still, someone won't like it.  That's ok. That's why the craft beer industry is amazing. There really is something for everyone.

My first brew day!

I'm not so new to beer that I don't know how brewing works, but never having brewed a beer myself before, it's like everything I thought I knew flew right out the window. I arrived at Home Brew Mart in a sleepy, half-hungover fug, and let the home brew advisor, Brit, lead me through my first recipe: grain measurement and milling, gathering hops, yeast, and additives.  I can't say that much of what she taught me stuck, except I learned that once it's in your bucket, it's going in your beer.  Luckily, I didn't screw that up too early.

Decisions were made!  We were making a hoppy red ale, using Centennial and Cascade hops, and California ale yeast from White Labs. We were aiming for a 5 gallon batch, which we would split into two 2.5 gal carboys and dry hop separately (...speaking of which, we haven't decided on which hops we'll use...oh well. We'll figure it out later.)

Thanks to Brit and Ballast Point Homework Series for making this recipe easy!

Brew day was actually awesome though. I have some great beer friends who knew what they were doing and once we got started and they talked me through the process, I realized I actually DID know a lot about what we were doing.  Mash, Sparge, Boil, Chill, Pitch, Ferment. How hard can it be?

Uhhhh....pretty hard.  It's all in the details, my friends (apparently, all my friends already knew this, so I don't know who I'm talking to, but still).

I've always been a big fan of baking--cupcakes, pies, bread, cookies--you name it, if it contains flour and/or sugar, I'm in.  Brewing is not that different from baking.  To be a good baker, you need precise measurements, to combine the ingredients in the correct order, to make sure your eggs and milk are at the right temp, to make sure you add your wet to your dry mixture at the right pace....

Of course, you can buy a box mix, dump in some eggs and oil, mix it together and throw it in the oven. But good cupcakes (I only think in cupcakes these days) require knowledge, precision, and a deft touch...and an evenly burning oven (sad face. My rental doesn't have a good oven).

Turns out that brewing is much the same. Once I got my hands on a thermometer to get the water up to temp, and Josh talked me through the process, it clicked. I can totally do this.  And so I did! And I loved it!  As much, if not more, than I love baking!

FYI: I make some yummy beer-infused cupcakes. It's my other hobby.

Home brewing is not without wildcards though.  We did overestimate the amount of water we were supposed to mash in with. We also didn't get the right proportions of water to grain while sparging (I think. Honestly, we won't know for another few days how this affected the beer).  We did damage control with a sugar additive. Our original gravity, before compensation was 1.077, which was higher than we expected, so we cut it with some water. And then we forgot to remeasure the original gravity once water was added and we chilled it. Oops.

Also, it turns out that one of my collaborators hated the Cascade hops I had picked out, so we debated whether or not to swap them out for something else right up until the last minute.  (We kept the Cascade--I mean, come on, who really hates Cascade?)

But I chalk this up to my perfectionism and my general panic that I was doing everything wrong.  Everyone else involved seemed calm and collected most of the time.

Anyway, we got it into carboys and fermenting away in some tupperware filled with water and icepacks.

Where we live in San Diego is not conducive to temperature control. Living half a mile from the ocean makes many homebuilders and landlords believe that we don't need air conditioning. And mostly, we don't. But those three weeks a year when the temperature spikes to 86 degrees, it gets HOT in these houses.  No AC, very poor insulation, and no trees for shade...when it's hot in San Diego, we live IN it. Being from the south, I know heat. But I also know how to get out of it.  This isn't possible in SD, and really isn't possible for my sensitive, temperamental, baby beers.

Bubbling away!  Note the ice pack.

In short, it takes three ice packs, swapped out morning, dusk, and midnight, to keep that water temp between 62 and 70 degrees.  It's been five days and it's bubbling up, happy and busy, just starting to chill out into teenage apathy.  Which reminds me that we really need to make a decision on those hops for dry hopping...meh, we'll figure it out later...

By the way, we named the beer "We'll Figure It Out Later" from Procrastination Station.  

First time home brewing?

You want to know what the hardest thing is about home brewing for the first time?
Everything.

#research

No matter what Charlie Papazian says in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing it is almost impossible to just relax.

You know what I love about craft beer?

It's the community. It's always having something to talk about. It's having something more to talk about than the weather,  because in San Diego the conversation about the weather is one note.  It's about meeting people and immediately feeling like kindred spirits. It's about meeting someone who knows more than you do and being able to ask real questions and not feel like your opinions and experience make you less able to contribute. It's also about meeting someone who knows less than you do and being able to ask them what they are interested in and not feel like they have nothing to contribute to the conversation. It's about building relationships and then building a community.

I know that people think the craft beer scene is pretentious and closed off. I've seen people believe in the stereotypes and I've seen rolled eyes when a beer geek obsesses about what is "good" on tap. I get it. I was once on the outside, too. As with anything, coming up against the wall of intense knowledge and love for something can be intimidating. There are people that think vegans are pretentious and closed off, but then see the intense environmental advocacy and respect for all living things that unites that community.  The point is, any group, when viewed from the outside, will seem walled in by their knowledge and their passion. Until you share a tiny bit of that, we all feel like we're on the outside of that wall with no way in.

But more often than not, I've seen those same "hipster beer geeks" try repeatedly to break down these walls.  I've attended beer community forums that demonstrate that they genuinely care about the local economy. I've seen groups of beer geeks advocate for grassroots changes in city codes or take on corporate dominance not just restricting their own growth, but the growth of other, non-brewing, businesses. I've seen them constantly and doggedly fight for the little guy.  There are organizations to empower women, reduce unsafe drinking, support failing businesses, fund a family facing hard times, and reinvigorate a struggling community or historical center. These don't look like the actions of an exclusive club or a business that is only looking out for itself. These are the workings of a community.

Maybe I'm biased because San Diego is such a beer-centric town. I'll concede that point.  It's a place where beer advocacy is the name of the game, and spreading the love of craft beer is essential to the survival of all 120+ breweries in this town. If they didn't reach out and try to convert new craft beer lovers, the county would not be able to sustain all these businesses. So maybe it's an act of self-preservation. But I don't think so.

San Diego is earning the title of "craft beer capital" because it genuinely wants to share its passion with the world (also, we have outpaced the other contender, Portland, though their count is in the city and ours is in the county...we need to discuss semantics).  This community is more inclusive than exclusive. There are so many breweries, home-brewers, aficionados, beer geeks, casual craft beer lovers here that it can't help forming a community, a network of "in-crowds" and we get some flack for that. But what makes San Diego's community special is that the sheer number of breweries in our county has forced beer culture to become ingrained in the fabric of society.  It's not just what some people do or love here, it's part of San Diego's charm.

Some argue this is a dangerous level of saturation. Some complain about the prevalence of an alcohol-centric culture. I'm a college instructor. I see the effects our craft beer industry has on the young people in this town. They care about quality, not quantity. They value small businesses, not corporate giants. They take pride in individuality, not mass production. There will always be a faction of society that just cares about getting drunk, but our craft culture makes the focus on the art, the technique, and the variety of different beers, not just the ABV.  I see more and more young adults learning to pay attention to not just what they drink, but how they drink--safely, locally, and focused on taste and quality.  This is a direct result of our craft beer community who always takes the time to do public outreach, to be a part of their communities, to meet and make connections with their consumers.

Consumer power is everything. But consumers who want to do more, who want to identify with and support the values, beliefs, and ideals of the producers of what they are consuming is a relatively new phenomenon.  In this era of "think global, act local" consumers can and should spend their money where they feel an connection with the product.  We should never forget this power, as consumers or as producers.

This community is what I love about craft beer. It's an eco system where we all play a role, from the brewers to the investors to the beer geeks to the accidental consumers. Emphasizing the wall between the industry and the general non-craft beer drinking public won't help anyone and we know it. This is why this town and this community is all about the relationships that make a vast, complicated web of interconnectedness.  These relationships help this slightly-socially-awkward, conversationally-challenged beer lover make friends and make small talk that isn't painful.


(Photo below: San Diego Beer Forum on March 6 2016 @Mission Brewery to discuss the state of San Diego beer industry.)