Strangest bottling issue I've ever encountered (with picture)

The first bottle, in my opinion, has a longer period of time slowly releasing co2 and pushing out the oxygen before you cap it. When i bottle i rest a cap on the top directly after i fjnish filling it so some oxygen can escape and it builds a layer of co2 on the top. Then i put the bottles in a large cooler to maintain a steady temp throughout the conditioning process. I live in an apartment wjth fluctuating temps. 90+ degrees sounds insanely high

 

It seems to me like that quality difference is too extreme to explain its probable cause the way you did. There must be another explanation, but I don't have any clue to be able to suggest anything.

 

I've only bottled once and used EZ Cap bottles to boot with only a few bombers with regular caps, but I'll offer this one suggestion: could it be your capper or caps? Did you sanitize your caps? When I cap, I give the cap a good, firm grip and see if I can turn it. You didn't make the remark of your beer being flat so you probably had a good seal.

 

This is probably the result of oxidation combined with poor storage conditions. Oxidation can cause pale beers to take on a reddish brown color after a period of storage. The staling process was probably accelerated by the high temps of your conditioning period.

My guess would be that you exposed the beer to oxygen during bottling, and that for some reason or other a few bottles escaped exposure. There are a number of ways I could imagine this happening: for example, if the beer was moving at a much faster rate when you started bottling (due to the added volume/pressure) than when you finished, you could get a lot of oxidation in the first bottles and much less in the last few, when the flow was more of a trickle. Also, some of the bottles might have been exposed to much higher temperatures due to their placement in the garage: I assume temps vary in there pretty widely.

Anyway, my takeaway would be to try to minimize oxygen exposure during bottling and to bottle condition at 65-70F.

 

You oxidized during an early step and it took a while to darken/stale.

 

@MiScusi , I think the overall issue is indeed an oxidation process that was accelerated by the high storage temperatures as you pointed out. I am sorry for your loss here but I suppose that the half full way of viewing this is you learned a powerful lesson?

As to the mysterious case of why your first bottled beer seemed to hold up better, I personally do not know the answer. @langdonk1 has an interesting theory in his post.

Cheers!

 

I guess this is what happened to my first brew. At first the bottles were OK, seemed to be 'not exactly right'. All of them tasted "woody", so I jokingly called it Sawn Timber Ale or something. Eventually I tasted one, found it horrible, then tasted a good Stone IPA clone and found that it had that flavor of the first. When a beer leaves such a bad taste in your mouth that a fresh beer cannot restore, it becomes Drain Pour Ale, and that's what I did with my remaining bottles.

Your picture gives me a good idea though: take a picture of a glass full before bottling/kegging, then take another after it has matured.

 

If you are doing these at the same time, I would discontinue this method. I use Oxiclean for my fermenters and hoses...but I wash them really well afterwards...and by really well I mean each thing is heavily rinsed 3-4 times. If you're washing with Oxiclean and then rinsing once, and then dipping in Starsan...I would personally have concerns that there was some residual Oxiclean left.

 

I suppose having residual oxiclean in your equipment could in theory expedite oxidation. Perhaps there was little to no oxiclean in the first bottle but it slowly crept into the rest of the beer?
This happened to me on my first batch and come to think of it I was using the one step easy clean (similar to oxiclean)that came with my homebrew kit. I didn't rinse well as I was afraid it would introduce unclean water to my bucket. I also didn't know the difference between cleaning and sanitizing. So this one step cleaner was all I used.
Just throwing out ideas but @JohnSnowNW got me thinking. Definitely gotta rinse oxiclean thoroughly with warmer water than it soaked in.

 

I learned in a brewing class that beer goes stale from oxidation 3x faster for every 10*F it's raised. So stored at 70* give it about 3 months for peak goodness. At 80* 1 month.

 

Beer staling (an oxidation process) follows the Arrhenius Equation: chemical processes take place 2 times faster for every increase of 10°C (18°F). So, a beer stored at 52°F will last twice as long as a beer stored at 70°F.

You can learn more about the Arrhenius Equation here: http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physica...on_Rates/The_Arrhenius_Law/Arrhenius_Equation

Cheers!

 

Crazy thought... Could that one bottle have been infected, with the infection taking precedence over oxidation? Since you drank it soon after bottling would it not had a chance to change its flavor/color much?

 

What kind of caps do you use? Do you use the plain ol' cheapos from the LHBS, or do you buy the pricier Oxygen scavenging ones?

 

I recall that @OldSock had a similar experience, or rather ran an experiment that had similar results. I can't find it now, I think he must have posted it on a different forum. In essence he exposed a light beer to air for a few weeks and it turned remarkably dark and tasted terrible. Ah, wait, here we go: a striking picture on Twitter. Discussion here. (It's a long and mostly pointless discussion, but long story short, oxygenation is a plausible culprit. Also, @OldSock tried adding a bit of OxyClean to a glass of beer and didn't notice any color change over several hours.)

 

Do you wash and sanitize in bulk? What do you do with the leftover caps that have been washed and sanitized that you don't actually use? Do you let them dry and then used them on a later batch?

 

That might be a large part of your problem. The "Oxygen Barrier" caps are wet activated. Once they get wet they activate the special barrier properties. Essentially, by getting them wet, then drying and storing them for future use you removed the barrier protection that those caps have, then cooking the beer at 90*F+ accelerated the oxidizing. This could be the reason that all but one went bad. Maybe the one that stayed fresh received a brand new cap while all the others got the old caps. They held a seal so they were carbonated, but still allowed enough O2 in to ruin the batch.

On a side note, why do you Oxiclean them first? They should be clean already from the manufacturer? Stored in a plastic baggy, there is no reason to do the extra step. In 4 years of brewing I have only ever tossed a handful at a time into a bowl of StarSan or into my Vintanator dish, and pull them as needed.