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Food

Infected Beers Can Be Delicious Mistakes

It's flu season, and like any living creature, craft beers can get infections. Sometimes, the infection is out of your control and can make your beer taste like skunk and wet cardboard, or if you're lucky, green apples.
Photo via Flickr user Nicola

Welcome back to our column Nomadic Brews, from gypsy brewer Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø of Evil Twin Brewery. Every month, we'll check in with Jeppe and publish his dispatches from his travels around the world, as he brews in places like Mexico, Taiwan, and Brazil.

I was in Rio de Janiero for five days in November to judge a relatively new festival called "Mondial de la Biere," which has about 160,000 spectators. I was one of six judges from around the world, and we tasted more than 280 different beers over the course of a day and a half. On day one alone, we tasted about 90 different beers. You don't get drunk, but you can feel the buzz. I am a good drinker—if I have one talent in life, it's to drink a lot of alcohol and not get drunk.

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It was exhausting to taste so much: your tongue gets fatigued, which makes it difficult to differentiate flavors.

It's very similar to wine-tasting, except we have to swallow during tastings because we detect bitter components on the back of the tongue. If you don't swallow, you won't taste the full flavor. There's no bitter components in wine, so you taste it with the front of your tongue.

When I do wine tastings, I swallow, because I like the feeling.

When you're tasting beer, you're also looking at the beer: Is it clear or hazy? Does it have a muddy look to it, or are there yeast sediments present? There's often yeast in the bottle with craft beer.

You will smell it like wine—is it sweet, bitter, floral? What's the mouthfeel? What's up with the carbonation? If it's totally flat or overly carbonated, I am not a fan. Too much carbonation could signal an infection.

I always look for balance, but that's where a lot of craft beer fails. You can have an IPA that's crazy bitter to the point that you can't drink it. Big imperial stouts, which a lot of breweries release annually, are not drinkable. They taste like cookie dough and are way too sweet, but people love that shit.

Some craft brewers pasteurize their beers to keep a consistent product. This kills the live yeast and makes the beer taste the same every time.

I've had beers that have blown up on the shelf, and had I pasteurized those beers, that wouldn't have happened. But that's part of the learning process, and the beauty of craft beer: You're working with a live product. Small craft breweries always work with live product, and might never make the same beer twice, even if it's the same recipe and ingredients the second time. If it was warmer in the winter when it was fermenting, it might taste different than the next year, even if it was made in exactly the same way. That's a beautiful thing. People are not perfect, so why should the product be perfect?

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Everything nowadays is craft: natural wines, coffee, chocolate, whatever. It's fun because that weird funk in your biodynamic wine can surprise you.

At a beer tasting, an infected beer isn't a good thing. An infection can be due to a lot of things, and make the beverage completely undrinkable. I had one beer at the panel—I almost died when I smelled it. It was one of the worst smells I've ever come across in my life. It smelled sour and soapy; it would have been nasty to drink.

Since it was off, it probably had to do with bacteria because the system wasn't cleaned properly before brewing. With sourness, it's an infection that develops over time.

If you taste a fresh beer, it can be really good, but if you store it for a year, it can taste crazy sour. That's an infection that goes south over time. This beer wasn't fresh. Then, a very common infection that I noticed on the judging panel in Brazil was a butterscotch flavor, or diacetyl—it's a yeast infection in beers. Some beers, like Czech pilsners, go for a little bit of that in a subtle kind of way.

I've consumed over 20,000 beers over the course of 15 years. You practice and learn how to taste beer and what to look for. Some of the beers I smelled were like opening a fresh package of melted butter. That's one of the most common infections out there. This happens a lot when people are starting out in craft beer making.

If your beer smells like green apples, it's a mistake. In some beers, you want that—in Belgian ales, this is present, but it's considered a floral note.

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The other is if it smells and tastes like burned rubber. If it tastes like wet cardboard, your beer has experienced oxidation. You definitely don't want that in a fresh beer, but I also don't like drinking wet cardboard.

Skunked beer is also known as getting "light-struck" if it gets too much light (this can happen in green bottles) for craft beers that aren't pasteurized.

Some beer styles are created with these defects to be a part of the flavor of the beer.

Infections can be on purpose. You might hear about people making a Belgian brown ale, and after they put it in the barrel (and didn't add anything to it), it might come out tasting sourly amazing on accident (like a Flemish red). You can play the lottery with infections—when it works to your favor, it can be the best thing for your beer.

It's a live creature, and it can move into different directions.

There are, of course, purposeful infections out there. All sour beers, for example, are infected. Craft brewers have learned how to inoculate these infections. A lambic—the perfect, most pure of sour beers out there—is a wild yeast infection that you can't control. Brewers can blend it so that it can taste the same almost every time. It's live—it can change flavor, but there's ways that you can balance it out.

When you're working on a sour beer, you always have a certain idea of where the yeast is going to go. It's something that you want to control, but sometimes something wild can happen. If an unintentional error occurs, it could be the best mistake you've ever made.

Twelve years ago, I judged a home brewing competition in Denmark, and the one that ended up winning was an unintentional brown ale that the brewer had added blueberries to. No one made berry sours back then, and it tasted fucking awesome. When I spoke to the homebrewer about it, he told me that he had no idea how he made it. He'll never be able to make it again because he didn't remember what he did to screw it up.

As craft brewers, we try to play God and make sure that we know exactly what we are putting out there in the way that we've intended it, but sick beers and mistakes can be cool.