Five Months of Beer That Tasted Like a Doctor's Waiting Room

The garage years

I am thirty six years old and for two of those years I made genuinely good beer in a garage in Gqeberha. I want to say that plainly at the start, because everything that comes after is going to make me sound like an idiot, and I would like the record to show that I was not always an idiot.

The garage used to hold a car. Now it holds a three vessel setup I built over eighteen months, a chest freezer with a temperature controller wired into it, a shelf of grain in sealed buckets, and a fan in the window that does almost nothing against the smell. Roxy, my wife, has never once asked me to stop. She has asked me to close the door when the wort is boiling, which is fair, because boiling wort smells like hot bread and stewed vegetables and it gets into the curtains. Her exact words, delivered flatly from the kitchen doorway one Saturday morning, were: "I can taste your beer in my coffee." She still married me knowing this was coming, so I consider that a settled contract.

The tasting group is four or five of us, depending on who is around. Sanele is the one who matters. Sanele does not do the polite thing where you swirl and nod and say interesting. Sanele took a mouthful of my first ever pale ale, four years ago now, held it, swallowed, and said "this tastes like a wet dog that has given up." He was right. He was also right the day he said my dark mild was the best thing I had made, and because he was right about the wet dog, I believed him about the mild. That is the whole value of a Sanele. You cannot buy one.

So for two years I brewed and they drank and it was good. Then in about March it stopped being good.

The taste

The first time I noticed it I thought I had a cold coming.

It was a batch I had made twenty times. Simple pale ale, nothing clever. I pulled a glass off the tap in the garage, and underneath the malt and the hops there was this other thing. Faint. Right at the back of the throat, arriving late, after the swallow.

Band-aid. That is the shorthand everyone uses and it is annoyingly accurate. Not the injury. The plaster. That plastic and adhesive smell of the box of Elastoplast in the bathroom cupboard. Mixed with something more medicinal, like the inside of a medicine cabinet, like a cotton wool ball that has touched antiseptic. It coated the roof of my mouth and stayed there for about a minute after I had swallowed, faint but absolutely present, like someone whistling in the next room.

I poured it out and told myself it was one bad glass.

Sanele came round two weeks later. He took a mouthful. He did the hold, the swallow, the pause. Then he put the glass down on the workbench with real care, the way you put down something that has died, and said, "Bru. Why does your beer taste like a clinic?"

The spiral, with spreadsheet

Here is where I stopped being a hobbyist and became something closer to a conspiracy theorist.

I opened a spreadsheet. It started with six columns and by the end it had thirty one. Batch number, date, yeast strain, yeast batch code, starter or no starter, fermentation temperature at 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, sanitiser brand, sanitiser contact time, sanitiser rinse or no rinse, hose age, keg post seals, grain supplier, grain lot, boil vigour, whether load shedding hit mid ferment, and a column called NOTES which was mostly me swearing at myself in lowercase.

I attacked it in order of what I thought was most likely.

Yeast first, obviously. Wild yeast can throw phenolics. I binned my whole yeast bank, every slant, every jar, and bought fresh from two different suppliers. Same fault.

Sanitiser next. I convinced myself I was leaving residue. So I rinsed everything, obsessively, and then read that rinsing was the actual risk and stopped rinsing, and then switched sanitiser entirely. Same fault.

Temperature. I put a second probe in the fermenter because I decided the first probe was lying to me. It was not lying. I was.

Then I got expensive. I replaced every silicone hose in the garage. I stripped and rebuilt the kettle valve, convinced something was living in the threads. I bought a new mash tun because I had a theory about the old one's plastic. I want to be honest about the money: I did not add it up at the time, because I did not want to know, but it was thousands of Rands. Roxy knew. Roxy never said a word about the money. She said one thing, once, when I was sitting on an upturned bucket at eleven at night staring at a fermenter like it owed me an apology. She said, "You know it's just beer, hey."

It was not just beer. It was two years of being good at something.

By month four I was rinsing my mouth with water between sips to reset my palate and finding the taste anyway. I made a batch where I sanitised everything twice, pitched two packets of fresh yeast, held the temperature within one degree for eight days, and did not touch the fermenter otherwise. It came out clean, bright, decent hop character, and then, half a beat after the swallow, there it was. Plaster. Medicine cabinet.

I sat in the garage with the wind doing its Gqeberha thing against the roller door, that low endless shove that makes the metal breathe in and out, and I decided I was finished. I told Sanele I was going to sell the setup. He said "ja, okay," which from Sanele is a kind of concern.

The variable I had never written down

I dumped roughly two hundred litres over those five months. I know the number because it is in the spreadsheet, in a column I added late, called WASTED, which I regret naming that.

The thing that saved me was a throwaway comment. My cousin, who is not a brewer and does not care about beer, asked me, mostly to be polite, "so what do you actually put in it?"

And I said, without thinking: malt, hops, yeast, water.

Water.

Thirty one columns. Not one of them was water. Five months of forensic paranoia and I had never once written down the thing that makes up ninety odd percent of the product, because water is not an ingredient, water is just the background, water is the thing the ingredients arrive in.

And then, standing there, the timeline assembled itself in about four seconds and I felt genuinely ill.

Around the start of the year our supply had gone strange. Interruptions, then pressure that came and went, and at some point the municipality had clearly changed something on their side, because the tap started smelling faintly like a swimming pool in a way it never used to. And because of the interruptions we had done what half the street had done and put in a JoJo tank, fed partly off a borehole arrangement a neighbour and I share. Which meant that for months I had been brewing on municipal water, and sometimes tank water, and sometimes an accidental blend of both depending on what was in the line that day, and I had recorded none of it, because water is just water.

Phenol plus chlorine equals chlorophenol. I knew that sentence. I had read it years ago. I just never thought it applied to me.

Sending it away

I stopped guessing. I found out how to have my water properly analysed and sent samples off, one from the municipal line, one from the tank, both taken the same morning, both labelled in my terrible handwriting. I felt slightly ridiculous doing it. Grown man, garage, courier bag of tap water.

The report came back and it was the least dramatic document imaginable. A page of parameters and numbers with a column of limits next to them. No verdict, no accusation, just what was actually in the water, which is exactly what I had needed for five months and had never asked for.

And it reframed everything. The two supplies were not the same water at all. They were different in ways that mattered to a process that boils, ferments and concentrates whatever it starts with. The disinfection side of the municipal supply was doing precisely what my grain and my yeast were happy to turn into that plaster taste, and the tank was its own separate story with its own separate profile. I had been running a five month experiment on a foundation that was quietly changing underneath me, and every single conclusion I had drawn was built on the assumption that the foundation was constant.

It cost me a fraction of what the mash tun cost. I could have had water testing done in week one for less than one of my panic purchases. Sanele, when I told him, laughed for an uncomfortably long time and then said, "So the beer was fine and you were the problem." Which is not quite true but is close enough that I did not argue.

What I actually learned

The fix, once I knew what I was fixing, was almost boring. Treat the water before it goes anywhere near grain. Know which supply you are on. Write it down.

The next batch was clean. Not clever, not award winning, just clean, with nothing arriving late after the swallow. I drank half of it standing up in the garage at nine in the morning like a lunatic. Roxy came out, looked at me, and went back inside without comment, which I have chosen to interpret as respect.

What sits with me is not the two hundred litres. It is that I am a person who keeps a spreadsheet with thirty one columns and I still managed to leave out the biggest one. My assumption was not that the water was good. It was more embarrassing than that. My assumption was that water was not a variable at all, that it was the stage rather than an actor on it. And the whole time, the answer was sitting in a report that people with proper equipment produce all day long, that anybody can request, and that I did not request because asking felt like admitting I did not already know.

I have since met other brewers here who have had exactly this, and every one of them describes the same arc: months of blaming yourself, then someone mentions water laboratories and the whole thing collapses into an afternoon.

I keep the report in the folder with my recipes now, right at the front. Not because I read it often. Because it is a reminder that the question I am not asking is usually the one that matters, and that people who run water labs have been unglamorously answering that question for a very long time while I was in a garage rebuilding a perfectly good valve at midnight.

Sanele has a new line now. When anything goes wrong, anywhere, with anything, he says: "Have you checked your water?" He thinks it is very funny. It is a bit funny. It is mostly just correct.