Off Flavours in Beer: A Q&A with Ray Daniels

Why they’ll likely never disappear from beer — and how to make sure they don’t creep into your brewery’s lineup. A Q&A with Ray Daniels and the Beer Sisters.

The Beer Sisters: Craft beer is not new and beer education is better than ever. So why are we still seeing off flavours in professionally-made beer? 

Ray Daniels: Well, there are a lot of them. And ingredients change every year. We forget that beer is the product of two significant agricultural products—hops and barley—and their properties and characteristics change every year. Brewers do an amazing job of adapting and producing a fairly consistent product but it means they have to do different things from year to year to adapt and avoid any problems. Plus, things are always changing in the brewery—people make new beers, there’s new equipment and new people so things happen. There are so many different ways for untoward flavours to show up in finished beer that it takes a tremendous amount of training and vigilance to ensure the quality of finished product. 

BS: What off flavour do you think consumers notice the most?

RD: When people are completely untutored, sourness of some sort is likely the most common thing. Mirella Amato tells a great story about sitting next to a young woman at a bar and she orders a beer, tastes it, smacks her lips a little bit and says, “Oh, it’s kind of tappy.” Mirella had already noticed the draft lines were dirty and she was picking up diacetyl and sour flavours. That woman knew the flavour was different, and her descriptor for it was “tappy.” 

BS: What do you say to breweries who’ve noticed an off flavour in their beer, but they reason that drinkers haven’t noticed it, and the profile isn’t that high, so they release the beer because they don’t want to pour money down the drain? 

RD: Well, in trying to save a little money, you can pour your whole reputation down the drain. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The Greeks referred to taste as the most unreliable of the senses so people often times are reluctant to say anything when they perceive a flavour that they don’t like, or that they think is inappropriate because we can’t point to it, or see it. Of all the senses, it’s the hardest to commonly pinpoint. Even sound is easier to pinpoint, for example—if you notice something strange, two people can sit there at the same time and wait until it occurs and then hear it at the same time. 

When you’re tasting, there’s nothing to put your finger on, no instance of occurrence. So flavour is hard to talk about and for the untutored, they don’t want to say anything. They’re going to smile and say thanks and the next time they’re making a decision about what to drink or where to go, they’ll go somewhere else. The same goes for bars—nobody ever complains, but after one beer they might go to the bar down the street because the beer just tastes better over there. So people do make decisions based on flavour even if they don’t articulate those perceptions. 

BS: Any top tips for brewers to prevent off flavours in their beer?

RD: Taste everything all the time. That kind of covers it. 

I once went to the morning taste panel at Anheuser-Busch, before the ABI acquisition. The brewers started their morning taste panel by smelling the condensate from the kettle stack to make sure that it smells the way it’s supposed to smell because these master brewers had been smelling it for 20 years, and if it smells wrong they know something’s going on with this batch. They taste the water that is made to brew each batch of beer every morning to make sure there’s not a spike of iron or sulphur in the water supply. They taste the unfermented wort. They taste the beer at end of primary fermentation, and then about every five days in the first 15 days of lagering, and every day after that to know when it’s adequately mature to be released. That schedule is not exact, but it gives you an idea of the intensity of the tasting. Up until the time the beer is released, every lagering tank is being tasted daily by five or six master brewers. That’s before it even goes to the Quality Control panel, made up of trained tasters who decide if the batch is good to go. 

There’s an intense process that’s involved in evaluating each beer and catching things a long, long time before the beer is packaged, carbonated, and ready to go out the door. 

BS: What’s the biggest mistake bars and restaurants make in contributing to off flavours?

RD: Inadequate line cleaning is number one on the draft side of service. On the bottles and cans side, the big mistake is just holding stuff in warm storage for too long. 

Let’s say you have to order a whole case of something to have it on your menu, but you’re only selling one a week. The last couple of cans in the case are going to spend 4 or 5 months in storage before getting sold. So by the time it gets to the customer, it could easily be a year since it was packaged, so that stuff is going to be stale if it’s held at room temperature. 

BS: What can we expect at your “What’s Wrong with That Beer” Seminar at the Canadian Brewing Awards on May 3, 2019? 

RD: We’re going to talk about some common off flavours in beer that are primarily brewer related. They are also going to be some flavours that are not found in our usual six basic off-flavour training paradigm. I’m going to talk about real life scenarios of breweries that I’ve known, and often times have been involved in conversations with brewers and owners  trying to identify an off flavour, and me sometimes perceiving an off flavour in their beer that they didn’t catch. We’ll look at specific scenarios where a brewery was putting beer out to its customers that had a clear and obvious off flavour, tell that story, have everyone taste a beer and talk about what the off flavour is and how that brewery could prevent or solve it. 

Join Ray on Friday, May 3 at the Canadian Brewing Awards for more!