Beer Tasting - Phenols

Yesterday we had a holiday office party at work, and gawd bless her heart our secretary picked up some great craft beer for it. There was a 6 pack of Steam Whistle, as well as an Ontario Craft Brewers Discovery Pack, which is 6 beers from 6 different breweries. A few of the guys were really into tasting the different beers, and were passing them around one-by-one serving themselves 100ml or so in a small tasting glass. When the Nicklebrook Premium Organic Lager was going around, one of the guys commented that it tasted sort of like Hoegaarden, which piqued my interest. I grabbed a glass and got them to pour me a bit - and just as I'd suspected, it was off. I didn't want to say anything at the time since I did not want to seem snobby, but after I'd gotten home I drafted an email to the guy who'd made that comment, just to educate him a bit since he'd commented earlier that he wanted to learn more about beer. This article is based on that email.

Unfortunately, Nicklebrook seems to have a quality control issue. I bought 2 of those same beer about 2 or 3 weeks ago and the first one was really, really terrible - was way further off than the one at the office. It was really cloudy which that beer should not be, so I dumped it. The 2nd one I had was perfect and really good, so I drank it of course. That beer should be light colour and light tasting much like maybe a Stellar Artois, or just about any generic European lager.

The flavour my coworker identified as being "like Hoegaarden" is a phenolic flavour, often described as "medicinal" since it is found in some medicines too. "Band aid" is another proper beer term used to describe this flavour. There is a good reason why it tasted like a Hoegaarden though, since many types of Belgian beer like the style Wit (of which Hoegaarden is an example) and a number of others, are brewed with a very special strain of yeast (actually a number of very special strains of yeast that are all closely related to each other but quite different from most other beer yeasts). These special Belgian yeasts produce phenols, and this is considered to be a desirable part of their flavour profile. In small amounts, and of the particular chemical composition produced by these desirable yeasts.

It also so happens that a lot of microorganisms produce phenols as they ferment. Both bacteria and yeasts. And most of these phenols are considered extremely undesirable in beer. Most of the organisms producing these undesirable phenols are considered to be infections in beer, and that's what we tasted at the office in that organic beer. Don't worry, it won't kill you and won't even make you sick or anything. And in fact in small, measured amounts, it is not even unpleasant and not even too different from the desirable phenols produced by the special Belgian (and some Bavarian as well) yeasts. That's basically what we tasted in the beer in question - it was really indistinguishable from the desirable phenols, even to me. I only know it was off because I know that beer should not have those flavours because it is not brewed with one of the phenolic yeasts. The one I had a few weeks ago was well, well beyond that point and even to an untrained pallet would have tasted just terrible. If this beer had stayed on the shelf any amount of time, it would have gotten worse and worse.

I actually once had an infection in a batch of my beer, which produced a lot of phenols that made the beer taste very much like a Bavarian Hefeweizen, which is another type of beer brewed with a special phenol-producing yeast. I got through most of the keg and it was really quite pleasant, though by the time I'd gotten to the last couple of litres the infection had gotten so bad that I had to dump the rest.

It seems that Nicklebrook are getting an infection at some point in their process. I tried to contact them about it but they do not even have an email contact off their website.