Tangled up in Brew – Homebrew Update: Blue Canary Cream Ale SKUNKED!

Whenever you talk with anyone who has brewed their own beer before, there are several truisms that will be expressed. Oh, there is the usual about how good it feels to craft your own beer, how good, fresh it tastes as well as the sense of accomplishment one derives from doing wheat the big boys do, only better. One other truism is that you will fail at least once in your goal. Well after hitting homeruns our first 3 times with Blue Canary Cream Ale, our last batch, sampled Saturday, is a strikeout. Pure and simple, it is a FAIL.

What we have now is about 4 gallons of skunky beer. It has very good aroma, very nice golden color but tastes terrible. This is what I think happened in this attempt. As mentioned in this post, we were trying a new way to do things, using a mini tap rather than bottling. The issues that cropped up during the process were myriad but one stands heads above the others.

We brewed 3 weeks ago and everything seemed to go well. Temperature and time were spot on but when it was time to pitch the yeast, we had a choice as the kit provided two different ones. We had done dry yeast before but had ordered a smack pack (you activate it 3 hours before pitching by smacking the bag) and both came. People are always commenting that they don’t provide sufficient yeast to do the job in a timely manner and many propagate the yeast ahead of time to build up the number of microbes. So, I figured if some is good, more is better and I pitched both yeast packages. After a week of fermentation, it looked and smelled good and we put it into 3, 1.5 gallon tap bottles, sealed it and waited 14 days.

The new tap system is a converted home tap from Coors, put together by following internet instructions. Two days before tapping, the first bottle went into the fridge to cool down and let yeast sentiment settle. The day before tapping, I went to attach the tap in order to allow the CO2 to fully infuse in the beer and we had a problem as the new tap leaked. I had failed to properly close the tap as a plastic pin, there to hold it closed when tapping, slipped past the hole it needed to lock in. This allowed it to leak a lot (my kitchen still smells like beer) but also blew out the rubber gasket rendering the tap useless. We poured off a couple of glasses from the bottle and noticed right away, a darker color. This is not totally unusual. However a taste revealed it to be very yeasty and not flavorful at all. This was not a cleaning/sanitizing issue, common beer making problem, as the beer smelled great and looked good and fermented in the same manner as before.

So we will try and use this beer in a beer bread recipe to see if it works for that and might try some other beer respires if the bread works. We will order the parts for a new tap, purchase another cream ale kit and try again.