I Left A Failed Brew On The Shelf But Now It’s Amazing

About a year ago I brewed an imperial habenaro saison. It bubbled slowly in the carboy for about a month so I primed it and bottled it. Then a few weeks later I opened one up and it was flat as a pancake... A couple months later gave another one a go... still nothing.

Having spent too much money on the brew I decided to let it sit on the shelf.

So today I am going to drain pour the bottles so I can recycle them and as I uncap one a little pffffft comes out. So I’m all: ok let me just check it out.

Poured it into a glass: amazing. Like crazy good. Like way better than beer I buy at the store.

So what happened? My guess is some wild yeast or some other buggy got into the beer and slowly fermented it since I am getting some subtle sour notes in there. Maybe I didn’t let it ferment enough? Maybe the alcohol got too high and so the pitch before bottling didn’t take?

Anyone had this happen? Since the beer was so good I would like to copy the result but I’m not sure what happened.

You said saison, so I imagine you were using some strain of saison yeast? If so, that could explain some things. Saison strains (there are exceptions, like Wyeast French Saison for example) can be quite finicky. I’ve had beers take a long time to reach terminal gravity (4-6 weeks) before.

I’ve never had carbonation issues but I have had whole batches that were really estery in the bottle, almost hefe-weizen like but after 6 months smoothed down quite nicely to something much closer to a belgian saison. Not certain if this is what happened to you of course, but in my experience it is a yeast that takes some patience.

Depending on the gravity measurements, alcohol percentage (you did say it’s an ’imperial saison’, though typing those words makes me shudder :P), pitching rate, fermentation temperature and perhaps other things, it could also have been a matter of too little healthy yeast left to carbonate it in a reasonable amount of time. That, especially combined with a ’finicky’ yeast strain could well explain it taking a good few months to properly carbonate.

Could be an infection though. What was your FG? If you’ve got a brett infection, and a reasonable amount of sugar left, beware bottle bombs. Fridging the beer once it reaches the right carbonation and drinking it quick helps, if this is the problem.

Anyway, glad it worked out. It’s always great when a shit batch turns good.

Funnily enough I’ve just had the complete opposite. A zwickel beer that started out fresh and lovely (some caramel some lemon some bitterness) has suddenly turned all smokey and rubbery and not in a good way. And it’s only been in bottle 4 weeks. Good thing I drank most of it whilst it was half decent.

And I had it the third way... made a porter that turned out harsh and estery like hell. After a month or two in the bottle it settled down and got flat, thin and boring.

The worst of both worlds... :)

I know another homebrew that tasted like piss back when it was fresh, and than became quite good ...
The beer name is dirty horse ...

so ... Congratz !