Acetio | Blogma

I made the mistake of buying beer at the Kroger's. About a third of the time I've gotten beer there it's been bad - had that hard-to-describe off taste that's not really skunky the way Corona is, but musty and just not right.
1/3 the time is far too often, and I should have learned my lesson a long time ago.

Beer going bad at the store is a problem that I've had more frequently in the south, and more frequently in the summer which tells me it's probably light/heat related.

So, I have some bad beer that I want to drink. How do I fix it?

There is an interesting thread at Chowhound about "cleaning" cheap vodka by passing it through a drinking water filter, and I thought it might be worth trying the same thing with beer.

This is the pitcher I used. The filter hasn't been changed in a long while, but still does the job of filtering out the chlorine and hydrogen peroxide in the tap water (at least enough so the taste is gone)

This is the beer I used. I'm more into porters now. Pale Ales are so 2007. Dundee actually has a number of decent beers. They make one called Honey Brown which I loved when I was younger; I even wrote a song about it back in 1996 or so. But it tastes too sweet to me now.

This is what it looks like in the glass. It's a glass from the Terrapin brewery in Athens, GA - famous for their Rye Pale Ale, which is good because it doesn't have as strong a rye flavor as other rye beers. Note the paint can opener on the side. That is the best tool I have for opening bottles. I like these types of glasses for beer - wide mouth so you can smell what you're drinking and they hold exactly the content of one 12-ounce bottle with room for head.

The beer foamed up a lot when I poured it in, which reminded me that, if nothing else, the beer would be totally flat by the end of the process.

It took almost exactly 10 minutes to drain through the filter. I was surprised at the color, I had thought that enough would have been filtered out to make it more amber.

The finished product.

The Results:

I knew it would be flat, but my first reaction was negative because it was completely flat. The texture of a beer is important, and the texture had changed a lot. The body was gone. Instead it was much more like a Guiness, which to me often has a "watery" quality. Some of this could also be due to the fact that the filter was still saturated with water from normal use earlier.

Also gone was the smokiness that this particular porter has a good amount of. But also gone was the skunky, off taste that I had been trying to get rid of in the first place.

I ended up finishing it, so it was good enough to drink, better than it had been. It tasted a bit like homebrew I've tried - it had a fresh quality that bottled beer usually lacks.

I'm off to filter the I.P.A. now.

Cheers