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Currently Playing: Common Homebrew Off-Flavours Explained | Causes, Fixes & Prevention

Why does your homebrew taste medicinal, buttery, musty, harsh or simply not quite right? In this complete guide to common homebrew off-flavours, we explain how to identify beer faults, what causes them and what you can do to prevent them. This video was inspired by the judging feedback from the Elusive Brewing 10th Birthday Homebrew Competition. Of the 66 homebrewed beers submitted, 35 passed the initial fault-screening stage. We went through the anonymised judging sheets to identify the problems that appeared most frequently, before sitting Rob down for what was meant to be a quick chat… Fifty minutes later, we had covered a fair bit of ground. We look at unwanted phenolic and plasticky flavours, astringency, harsh bitterness, musty or vegetal character, incomplete fermentation, diacetyl, acetaldehyde, carbonation problems and packaging faults. For each group of home brewing faults, Rob & Stiffo explain: 🍺 What the fault tastes or smells like 🍺 The difference between an off-flavour and appropriate beer character 🍺 The most likely brewing or fermentation causes 🍺 Whether the beer can still be rescued 🍺 What to change before brewing your next batch Not every unusual flavour is automatically a fault. Clove might be exactly what you want from a Belgian yeast, while smoke could be an intentional part of the malt bill. Context matters. The real question is whether the character belongs in the beer, works with the intended style and appears at an appropriate level. We also need to be honest about the word “fix”. Some fermentation problems can be improved before packaging, but faults such as oxidation, chlorophenols and severe astringency are difficult or impossible to remove once they are in the finished beer. Prevention normally gives you a far better result than trying to rescue the batch afterwards. Have you encountered one of these off-flavours in your own homebrew? Tell us what you could taste or smell, what beer you were making and whether you eventually worked out the cause. We’ll try to help where we can, and your experience might help another brewer diagnose their batch too. If you found the video useful, give it a like, subscribe to The Malt Miller and turn on notifications for more practical home brewing guides, brewing experiments, equipment walkthroughs and proper conversations about making better beer at home. 🔧 Everything you need for home brewing: https://www.themaltmiller.co.uk 📧 Subscribe to our newsletter for brewing tips, product launches and exclusive offers: http://eepurl.com/dcMMk1 📲 Follow The Malt Miller: Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/TheMaltMiller/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themaltmiller/ #HomeBrewing #HomeBrew #BeerFaults #BrewingScience #TheMaltMiller