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Fixing autolysis off-flavor?

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  • Fixing autolysis off-flavor?

    Anybody have experience fining out or otherwise reducing that bready autolysis flavor from an otherwise-finished batch?

    To be clear, I'm not asking how to avoid autolysis in general – I know, get the product off the yeast! We've corrected the process issue; we racked the next batch, brewed with the same yeast and honey (this is a mead), a lot sooner, and that batch tastes great, no bready off-flavor to speak of. But that doesn't change the fact that we've got 1,000 gallons of product that needs help.

    We did try blending a bit of the autolysed batch with a bit of the good batch, and while it reduced the off flavor, it certainly didn't eliminate it, so we decided to avoid going this route with the whole batch, as it seems like throwing good product after bad.

    We've added bentonite to a gallon of the stuff, on the theory that a big portion of autolysis byproducts are proteins and degraded protein pieces, so, we're keeping our fingers crossed that the bentonite will pull some of it out of solution. But it's a bit of a shot in the dark, I'd love to be able to try something somebody else has actually seen work.

  • #2
    Well, I won't leave you guys hangin' – the bentonite didn't work. Not only did it fail to remove the bready off-flavor we'd hoped it would, but, it added some earthy and rancid off-flavors to keep the original off-flavor company! I don't know enough about what's going in there to tell if I'm tasting the bentonite itself, some reaction it catalyzed, or if it just pulled other aromas out which had been masking other off-flavors that had been there all along, but, suffice it to say, the experiment was a miserable failure.

    Anybody else got any bright ideas?

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    • #3
      Don't know, but the options I can think of are:
      1. Dump it.
      2. Mask it (fruit? dry hop the crap out of it?)
      3. Sour ferment it (those little buggers can utilize pretty much everything into something tasty!)

      EDIT: Scratch most of those. Didn't see that it was a mead. Don't know how brett or other bugs would do in mead. Might be worth trying, if you've got the facilities, and if it comes to down to possibly dumping. If you've got the storage space in barrels or drums, might be a fun experiment... with nothing to lose!
      Last edited by NS_Nano; 03-10-2016, 12:04 PM.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by feinbera View Post
        Well, I won't leave you guys hangin' – the bentonite didn't work. Not only did it fail to remove the bready off-flavor we'd hoped it would, but, it added some earthy and rancid off-flavors to keep the original off-flavor company! I don't know enough about what's going in there to tell if I'm tasting the bentonite itself, some reaction it catalyzed, or if it just pulled other aromas out which had been masking other off-flavors that had been there all along, but, suffice it to say, the experiment was a miserable failure.

        Anybody else got any bright ideas?
        I would freeze it solid for days. Thaw it, don't move it (don't agitate) . Rack off the bottom and dump it then try a sample. I bet it's better, can't guarantee if it will fix it 100%.

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        • #5
          Re the sour bugs, I did have the idea to try re-fermenting with the original yeast strain – yeast extract is used as brewing nutrient all the time, and it's basically just concentrated autolysed yeast, so, the hungry little suckers should eat it right up, right? I guess it didn't exactly work out that way for WaterEng's client, but, hey, ya gotta try.

          Sadly, a meadery is a lot more like a winery than a brewery, so, no temp control, at least not in our very temperate climate, so, no way we can freeze it.

          Apparently we had a previous batch with the same problem that eventually conditioned out, but depending on how long "eventually" turns out to be, that's a lot of capacity to be sitting around doing nothing.

          Now that the bentonite has failed, I suppose we'll at least test the re-ferment scenario, and, who knows, maybe funk it up? We've been kicking around the idea of doing a sour, but, there's a pretty big step up in commitment between idle chatter and actually intentionally unleashing those beasties on our facility, so, who knows?

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          • #6
            Could you possibly try to scrub it out with CO2?

            Sent from my SM-G928I using Tapatalk

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            • #7
              Why wait until now to tell people that this is mead? The assumption is that you're asking about beer and malt beverages when asking on "probrewer". You may be better off asking in a wine forum or finding other mead makers. They may have more knowledge about what your options are.

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              • #8
                He actually said it was a mead in the original post. It is just buried in the text, and most of us skimmed over it, I think. Our fault for skimming!

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by NS_Nano View Post
                  He actually said it was a mead in the original post. It is just buried in the text, and most of us skimmed over it, I think. Our fault for skimming!
                  Ah yes, there it is whaddya know. The rest of the advice remains though. My personal opinion would be to dump it, it's probably cheaper than the time wasted trying to save it.

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                  • #10
                    As an aside, I wouldn't keep experimenting on the whole 1000 gallons. Just pull samples and do your tests in a carboy or other container. You could have got your bentonite results with only a gallon tainted that way. Much less risk of failure.

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                    • #11
                      Originally posted by soia1138 View Post
                      Ah yes, there it is whaddya know. The rest of the advice remains though. My personal opinion would be to dump it, it's probably cheaper than the time wasted trying to save it.
                      Mead is a lot more expensive to dump than beer.
                      Originally posted by NS_Nano View Post
                      As an aside, I wouldn't keep experimenting on the whole 1000 gallons. Just pull samples and do your tests in a carboy or other container. You could have got your bentonite results with only a gallon tainted that way. Much less risk of failure.
                      Good point. Actually he still try the frezing trick with a keg to see if it makes a difference.

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                      • #12
                        Sorry for the confusion! If there's a site for winemakers like this one, I haven't been able to find it (and given there's, what, maybe a dozen commercial meaderies in the US, we certainly don't have a forum like this of our own).

                        And, yeah, don't worry, we only bentonited a one-gallon sample; you may doubt my mental condition given I'm clearly brewing the wrong beverage, but I'm not quite that dumb!

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