Off Flavor in IPAs

So for a while now, every IPA (or pale ale, and almost every hoppy saison) I've brewed has had the same terrible flavor. I'm not sure how to describe it--chemical, or medicinal, or grassy, or something...it's not something I've ever tasted in a beer outside my own homebrews. And it's not a subtle off flavor; it takes over the whole flavor profile so much that aside from some generic bitterness/hoppiness, I usually can't even taste the hop character in these beers. I've tried to drink through some of them, they're not so disgusting as to be undrinkable, but mostly I've ended up giving them away to people who don't care.

This has ONLY been a problem in hoppy beers. Sometimes the beers have tasted fine at bottling, and then had this problem after conditioning; other times they already tasted like shit at bottling time.

The only cleaning products I use are oxiclean for cleaning, Starsan for sanitizing. No soap or bleach ever.

I have officially exhausted every idea I had about what the problem might be:

*I first thought it might be an infection, so I started going overboard with sanitation, and at one point even bought an entirely new set of equipment (fermenter, siphon, tubing, bottling bucket, everything) which I used for the first time on an IPA...no dice. Also doesn't seem like an infection because a) the flavors aren't remotely similar to any infection I've experienced before, and b) they don't change at all with time, even after a few months. And no carbonation issues.

*Then I thought it might be a problem with chlorine/chloramine since the off flavors from chlorophenols sound similar to these, so I bought a filter for chlorine AND started treating all my water with campden. And I started using only distilled water to make sanitizer and so on.

*Then I thought maybe it was a problem from oxiclean residue, so I've started going overboard on rinsing, and also soaking everything in Starsan solution for forever to wash off an residue.

*Then I thought maybe it was a problem with fermentation temperature, so for the most recent batch I carefully controlled temp and it never went above 70. Still has the problem.

I even thought maybe it was a problem from overexposure to hops, so I started making sure I got little to no hop trub in fermenters when racking, and have made sure no batch stays on dry hops longer than 10 days. I even reduced my dry hopping amounts (I was using as much as 6 oz in some batches).

I'm also baffled because all my other, non-hoppy beers are fine. Even heavily hopped beers like imperial stouts have been fine. So there seems to be some association with dry hopping...? I have a pale ale in fermenter now that I might try bottling without any drop hops just to see, but I don't really understand how dry hopping could be causing this problem. I brewed earlier batches of IPAs, and more recent batches of really hoppy saisons, that have come out fine even with lots of dry hops. And my hops are stored in a freezer, in vaccuum sealed bags, and I haven't used any hops more than a couple months after opening them.

Worth noting: in some 1 gallon batches I brewed, I had a much worse problem that might be an extreme form of the same problem, or might have been an infection that's unrelated, but in those batches the beers were naaaaaasty, tasted like burned metal, and had purplish colored dregs. OH, and those beers were also bizarrely dark in color--like some of them were 100% base malt and came out looking almost like a brown ale. Some of them looked fine and very light when brewed and even when bottled, then came out dark after bottle conditioning. And I went CRAZY with sanitation on those, like leaving the siphon and fermenters soaking for days in sanitizer solution up until right when I used them, and doing the same with some of the bottles and with the bottling bucket. The full batch IPAs haven't been that dark, but look maybe slightly darker than they should be.

So...what the actual fuck. I don't even have a crazy theory left about what's going on, but I know I've wasted dozens of gallons of beer at this point and am ready to quit brewing IPAs (formerly my favorite thing to brew) if I can't figure this out very soon.

 

To be clear: this is not a matter of just not liking the grassy dry hop flavor--I've brewed earlier IPAs with as much as 5 oz of dry hops for 14 days that I loved. This is something way different.

 

I mean I've had my homebrewer friends, as well as trading partners who are homebrewers, taste some of these beers and nobody had a confident answer. The only feedback I've had pointed to some of the same problems I identified as possibilities. And I've brewed 60 batches of beer myself and experienced the normal range of problems from infection to off flavors from high fermentation temp and so on...I know beer well enough to identify all the common off flavors. This one is just puzzling.

 

I'm drinking one of these beers now and trying to find the vocabulary to describe the flavor...it's slightly smoky maybe? Slightly metallic? But also a bit grassy, and bitter...it's hard to tell where the off flavor starts and where the normal IPA flavors play in. The really disgusting 1 gallon batches that I threw out tasted kinda like rusted metal that you then burned in a furnace using fresh cut grass as fuel.

 

I've used both a stainless steel and an aluminum pot. As for "brewing on," I'm not sure what you mean.

Grain handling: I've got grain from several sources. Got it freshly milled from local homebrew shop as well as shipped form several different online stores. Almost always buy grain right before I use it.

I've used both aluminum and SS pots and don't think I've seen a difference. Sometimes I scrub, but I always rinse well, and sometimes I don't really even scrub, just wash with water right after use and then wipe with a towel. Sometimes I've used oxiclean when cleaning kettle, sometimes just hot water. For plastics, just the normal stuff sold by homebrew companies--auto-siphon, clear tubing, and fermenting buckets (also used Better Bottles for some batches). But I don't see how it could be any of this equipment as I've used all the same equipment for dozens of batches of not hoppy beers that have turned out perfectly fine.

Fermenting mostly in Ale Pail buckets, sometimes in Better Bottles, usually let stay in primary 10-14 days before adding dry hops into the primary fermenter (I only transfer to secondary if I'm racking onto something that's going to re-start fermentation) but a few times have waited longer than that. I always bottle.

As far as I can tell, the beers taste fine before dry hopping, but I'll confess that usually I don't take samples of beers before checking gravity when they're ready to bottle. Sometimes, the uncarbed samples on bottle day have tasted OK; other times they've clearly had this off flavor. They always have it by the time bottle conditioning is done.

Dry hop process is typically a single stage dry hop for 10 days (used to do 14 days). In a couple cases I've done a two stage dry hopping with 7 days for each; I think once or twice I've done a single dry hop for only 7 days. Dry hop amounts have ranged from 2 oz to 6 oz. But also, my earlier IPAs also used 3-5 oz of dry hops and the same fermentation and hopping process, and did not have this flavor in the slightest. In fact, I just rebrewed my first IPA with only some minor recipe changes, no process changes aside from the increased sanitation and campden and so on that I've mentioned, and the rebrew has this nasty flavor and tastes nothing like the the original beer. Like, NOTHING like it.

My hops are stored in the freezer in vacuum sealed hop bags; sometimes I've used bags of hops that had been opened up to a couple months earlier, but other times I've used hops that I opened right when I used them (in this most recent beer, they were 2013 New Zealand hops that were unopened before use). AND I always smell the hops a lot and they've always smelled great so I don't think there's an issue with old/oxidized hops, but I could be wrong.

 

Have not moved or changed water at all. Sometimes I add gypsum for hardness since water here is fairly soft for IPAs, but not always. Same water used for all beers too and this problem is only in the IPAs...

And I've used probably 10-20 different hop varieties among these batches, many of them single hop batches. Most recent batch was a rebrew of an earlier batch and they're not even remotely similar. All of these beers taste the same, you can't even taste the hop profile in them.

Usually I pitch dry yeast packets straight into the wort. Sometimes I make starters from liquid yeast with filtered or distilled water. I used several different pots for starters depending how much starter wort I'm brewing. Cold, filtered tap water. Do not reuse yeast.

I've had people with me on brew day and had extensive conversations about this problem with people too. And again--there's no consistent difference in my brewing process between IPAs and other beers, and this problem occurs exclusively in the IPAs/PAs. All other beers have consistently come out great (dozens of them).

I agree that it sounds like a really bad phenolic, maybe chlorophenolic, type problem. I just can't figure out the source of the problem. If it's an infection then I don't know what I could possibly do to increase my sanitation practices--and I don't know why the infection would pop up only in the very hoppy beers which should be *least* susceptible to infection. Ditto if it's a chlorophenol thing or some other reaction to water chemistry--I'm using a chlorine filter *and* campden tablets in all batches now and have seen no difference since I started doing that.

Beers that have come out fine include porter, stout, brown ale, berlinerweisse, witbier, saisons, fruit beer, various light colored 100% brett beers and other experimental stuff...definitely not just styles that could mask the flavor. And also this flavor completely dominates the beers to the point it's basically all you can taste, I can't imagine any beer having enough other flavor to mask it.

I thought that too so I reduced hopping levels and no different. I've had this problem in pale ales/hoppy saisons with modest IBU levels and a couple oz of dry hops, and I've had it in huge 10% abv IIPAs. Also, my most recent batch was a rebrew of an IPA I brewed before--first batch was wonderful without a trace of this odd flavor, rebrew is gross and tastes not even remotely similar to the first batch.

Only the aforementioned gypsum, which I haven't added to all batches (and which I added to some earlier batches too that came out fine).

 

Yeah, I mean none of those flavors are really accurate to describe the way this tastes which is why I keep using so many different descriptors. It just doesn't seem to match any of the normal off flavors.

I'm prepared to start shipping some of these bad bottles off to experienced brewers for feedback if anyone's up for tasting some bad beer...

 

One more random idea--could there be a problem from hops exposed to light? I mean I am (unfortunately) intimately familiar with the taste of skunked beer and this definitely isn't that, but could there be some other problem resulting from exposure to light before or during fermentation? Doesn't seem likely but I dunno what else to think. One last thing I'm going to try on next batch is using gelatin or some other fining agent to clear the beer and see if that removes the off flavor.