CO2 Taint?

The ins and outs of putting your beer into kegs.

CO2 Taint?

Postby Cookie » Wednesday Mar 18, 2009 1:13 pm

G'day

I was gonna put this thread in commercial beer, but I figured you guys would know more.

This may only be a figment of my imagination, but when I drink draught (tap) beer I find it tastes slightly different from bottled. I beleive I can taste the bubbles (the same flavour for most draught beers I've had). It's as if the CO2 forced into the beer, or the stuff used to force the beer out of the kegs, tastes different from the CO2 produced naturally in the bottle.

Is this possible? Has any one else noticed this?

For those of you who have tried both force carbonation and "natural" carbonation in kegs, what do you think?

On the flipside, is it possible the bottle is leaving a taint?

I've always thought that draught beer was the best way to drink a beer taint-free; until last year when I decided I could taste the same "fake bubbles" in all draught beer.

I would appreciate any one's thoughts on this.
Cookie
 
Posts: 44
Joined: Thursday Feb 28, 2008 5:49 pm

Re: CO2 Taint?

Postby Trough Lolly » Saturday Mar 21, 2009 7:07 pm

G'day Cookie, I'll have a go at this question... :D

There is a clear, and in some cases, marked difference when you taste the same batch of beer out of a bottle compared to the kegged quantity. It's partially about carbonation - I'll assume that you don't have a system that is able to carbonate the kegged beer at exactly the same pressure as what's in your bottles, or vice versa - but I believe it's more about the flavour properties of beer in larger (kegged) versus smaller (bottled) volumes and the conditioning that occurs in the larger vessel. Now, I know you're already thinking that this assertion is irrelevant in relation to commercial beers that have been pasteurised and filtered etc before packaging.

My thoughts are, at this stage anyway, limited to what we experience when we drink beer out of a keg that has yeast in it, and compare that flavour profile to the same batch of beer that's been bottle conditioned, presumably with the same yeast as what's in the keg. A well known advantage of kegged beer is the potential benefit you have in relation to bulk conditioning. Then again, I've had beers dramatically lower in quality in a keg and when I've had a bottle of the same batch, the beer's nice and clean. My palate detects a noticeable decrease in hop bitterness and flavour in a keg compared to the exact same batch in bottles, over time.

CO2 is well known for increasing the relative bitterness / sharpness in a beer. You may have perceived a difference if the keg was less carbonated compared to what you drank out of the bottle - I doubt that the CO2 would have tasted different in each case, due to the CO2 itself. Often, it's simply the case that the brewer used a short chain sugar (eg, Dextrose) which tends to add a slightly dryer / sharper flavour profile to stubbies of beer compared to a keg of the same batch.

Cheers,
TL
Image Image
User avatar
Trough Lolly
 
Posts: 1647
Joined: Friday Feb 16, 2007 3:36 pm
Location: Southern Canberra


Return to Kegging

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 29 guests

cron