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).
4 comments:
panzers ripping through the forests mate…
A 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.
Those golden moments Adrian.
That 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.
Post a Comment