Nashville Craft Beer Week is here!

Unless you’ve been in Butte, Montana until today, you’ve probably already heard it’s Nashville Craft Beer Week. Great activities are planned all over town for the next seven days. It will be glorious! There’s no way you can do everything, so plan your itinerary carefully. We’re not even gonna try to tell you about them … Read more

Sometimes you don’t want to eat your veggies

While not as common as skunky beer or diacetyl off-flavors, dimethyl sulfide is another beer off flavor you’ll likely experience. Dimethyl sulfide, or DMS for short, is an organic sulfur compound that occurs naturally in germinated barley. Of course, germinated barley is is a major component of beer. DMS is often perceived as a vegetable … Read more

Cardboard & Lipstick

Along with Light Struck beer, oxidized beer is a common off flavor beer drinkers experience. Brewers can improve their quality control for problems like acetaldehyde and diacetyl, but it’s hard to fight oxidation because time is a significant contributor. Trans-2-nonenal is the chemical name, but everyone calls it oxidized beer. Beer drinkers vary in their perceptions, … Read more

This beer smells like Pepe Le Pew

So far in our exploration of beer off flavors, we’ve covered diacetyl (butter) and acetaldehyde (apples). While common, you may not have experienced those off flavors yet. But I bet you’ve had skunky beer. It’s probably the most common off flavor out there and you can usually smell it better than you can taste it. … Read more

Like a Granny Smith Upside Your Head

In the last post we discussed diacetyl, a buttery flavor that is one of the most common off flavors in beer. Next up is another common off flavor, acetaldehyde. If you’ve ever had a beer that smelled or tasted like apples, you’ve enjoyed acetaldehyde. It can’t hurt you at the levels you’ll find in beer, … Read more