I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending that I have kept to my blog brew schedule but I will start brewing them again next week and will catch back up by brewing a few a week for a couple of weeks. I should be back on track by September.
This week’s flavour compound is 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole (2,4,6-T) which if you are a wine lover you will know as cork taint. It is described as having a musty “damp basement” aroma and is perceptible in beer in concentrations as low as 0.094 parts per trillion (ng/litre). In wine the 2,4,6-T comes from the cork, in beer the water supply is the culprit. If the brewery uses chlorinated water 2,4,6-T is produced when chlorine reacts with dissolved organic carbon such as dead algae, bacteria or fragments thereof. 2,4,6-T is particular problem in breweries in the developing world where water is scarce and water treatment less effective.
I have heard anecdotal evidence that mustiness in general is found at higher concentrations around washing lines in the M4 corridor than anywhere else in the UK (careful Adrian).
panzers ripping through the forests mate…
ReplyDeleteA customer of ours a few years back had a tremendous appetite for Cantillon beers, often coming in and clearing the shelves of everything we had. He was a chef at a fairly local pub, and new his beer and wine pretty well. He claimed that about one third of Cantillon beers were corked. I was impressed that he could pick it out over everything else - they must have been knackered.
ReplyDeleteThose golden moments Adrian.
ReplyDeleteThat is a very clever palate Zak! Rather like smelling a slurry pit on a cattle farm and deducing the fact that one of the cows had eaten an apple. Either that or it was a load of old slurry.
Cantillon are gloriously ridiculas. I often pick a clorinated character in thier beers.
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