Homebrew Off-Flavor Fixer
For the home brewer who just cracked open the first bottle of a six-week batch and tastes something wrong, a sour that should not be sour, a buttery that should not be buttery, a weird plasticky phenol, or a cardboard note, and now has 44 bottles sitting in the closet waiting on a drink-vs-dump decision. Tell the tool the beer style, yeast strain, pitch temperature, fermentation temperature profile, days in primary, days in secondary, days bottle-conditioned, water source, cleaner and sanitizer used, and the off-flavor descriptors from a checklist of 17. One structured pass returns a diagnosis card: top 2 to 3 ranked root causes (sanitation, under-pitched yeast, fermentation temp too high or low, no diacetyl rest, oxidation, light-struck, DMS short boil, water chemistry mismatch, yeast strain ester profile, cold-side infection), the exact process change for next brew (lower pitch temp by 4 F, add diacetyl rest, swap cleaner, closed transfer), whether the current batch can be aged out or should be dumped, and a one-line sensory test the brewer can run on bottle 2 to confirm. Hard refusals fire for methanol fear questions, pressure-canned wort (botulism trap), gluten-free grain bills, proprietary house or brewpub yeast strains, and out-of-scope styles (sour and wild, mead and cider, distillate).