I’ve occasionally encountered references to “skunked” beer, and “corked” wine. But only in written contexts.
Are these actual phenomena that people deal with, such that I ought to revere those people and be grateful for their service to the cause of adult-beverage-drinkability, or am I better served by being grateful that my palate cannot discern such experience-ruining characteristics?
This might be more suited to IMHO. I will willingly acquiesce to any moderator action in this regard.
I don’t drink much wine or beer, but I know plenty of people who do drink far more, and they’ve experienced this, though for a variety of reasons.
First, the homebrewing friends. In this case, it’s a tossup of cheap corks, improper sanitation, poor storage, lack of space with temperature control, and a plethora of other point failures. In these cases, skunky beer and corked wine are probably the least of their worries, but it’s not exactly uncommon.
For more commercial operations, there’s a lot of talk about how clear bottles, excessive sunlight or heat exposure, and a list of other problems can turn otherwise fine beer into a sub-par shadow of itself. If you buy darker bottles (anecdotally) or non-transparent mediums and otherwise manage safe-storage, you’re apparently unlikely to ever experience the problem unless…
Yeah, your palate can contribute as well. Now 3-4 years back, a friend was visiting from out of state for a vacation, and we bought a six pack of a moderately expensive Japanese beer he liked. He drank it all, but complained that it tasted off, or skunky, or just wrong. And the next time he visited a couple of months later, we got him something else, yet the same occurred.
Turns out, the new high altitude meds he was taking for the visit (going from below 1k feet up to us at 6k had become very rough on him without them) had this as a known side effect! So anything carbonated (excluding various nitro options) had an off taste from them on. And I’m sure there’s a number of other scenarios given the wide ranging biology of humans that could cause similar issues, be it temporary or otherwise.
As for corking, since so many wines and other beverages are now sealed with artificial corks (even quite good ones) I hear that problem is far less common, and even before that, it was often an issue with proper storage / temperature / rotation.
I’ve had beer go skunky. It was generally improper storage, particularly sunlight on a light coloured bottle.
I also once had corked wine in a restaurant.
I’m not super-taster or anything, but it was just really off.
If you’ve actually received a can of ‘skunked’ beer you would know it; they don’t called it ‘skunked’ for nothing. I know there are people who are perfectly happy to drink skunky beer because Hamm’s was sold for decades and had a reputation for any given case to cover the entire spectrum of color and odor from water to waste sludge, but it is pretty unusually to get really skunky beer today unless someone left a case of IPA out in direct sunlight for many hours, or from a home brewer who doesn’t properly sanitize their gear.
‘Corked’ wine is a bit different. A wine that has ‘corked’ (i.e. experienced excessive oxidation during storage) will often have a somewhat sharply sweet odor (which disappears quickly after opening the bottle) but will not be unpleasant, and may taste anywhere from flat to sulphureous. I’ve only encountered one bottle in my life that was so corked as to be literally undrinkable but I’ve tasted a number of wines that were clearly flat and had the characteristic dried residue of wine up one side of the cork or a crumbly texture.
The synthetic (polymer) cork will almost completely eliminate corking but a lot of aficionados don’t like them because they purportedly interfere with the natural ‘breathing’ of a bottle as it ages. This would really only apply to well aged red wines with a high tannin content, so if you are just buying wine at the store to consume it really isn’t an issue. There is the concern about microplastics (most synthetic corks are produced from partially recycled plastics that are essentially just melted and pressed together) but frankly unless you are RO filtering all water, not eating any fish or seafood, and avoiding anything stored in a plastic container or plastic-lined steel or aluminum can, you are getting your daily dose of microplastics anyway.
Stranger
Corked wine is indeed an actual thing. However, modern knowledge and production methodologies have made it a lot rarer than it used to be. As I described here (in a longer thread about food rituals), I’ve never been served a corked bottle myself, in over thirty years of fine dining.
There’s also some discussion here.
And the result of corking is distinctive and (here is where I disagree with the preceding) unmistakably unpleasant. It’s like old wet cardboard. It doesn’t matter how inexperienced your palate is — if you smell a corked wine, you’ll know it.
Edit to add: I know this because, despite never having been presented a corked wine “in the wild,” I have smelled reproductions of the aroma in a couple of different wine-production facilities and informational exhibitions. This one is particularly excellent.
I don’t know why I clicked on that link hoping to go to a site where I could smell what “corked” wine smells like.
Or maybe that site does let you do that, but only if you know how to read French.
Heh. While there may be legitimate applications for reproducing and transmitting scent on a web page, the potential for mischief and abuse makes this an unwelcome path for development, I think.
Only The Most Interesting Man In The World can smell in French.
I’ve heard corked wine smells like a wet paper bag, it’s much less common than it used to be.
Every St. Pauli Girl beer I’ve had over the course of 40 yrs has tasted skunky. That only amounts to 3 or 4 episodes, since I avoid consuming it. But every few decades it will be the only beer served at a party and/or my curiosity gets the better of me and I try it again. Yep, still skunky. I’m starting to think it’s not just a matter of improper storage.
I’ve definitely encountered “skunked” beer plenty of times. It’s particularly common for “cask conditioned” English bitter (I’ve never been able to drink sour beer as it just reminds of drinking in my old local in England on Sunday night when the landlord hadn’t cleaned the pipes for a week 
). It also happens with other styles too, though less with the mass produced lagers (that’s kind of the whole point of “macrobrewery” lager it’s bland but will taste exactly the same every time, like MacDonalds)
Can’t say as I’ve ever had corked wine at a restaurant though have with wine I’ve brought at a liquor store (with an old bottle of wine I’ve brought cheap at the corner store)
Yes, corked wine is definitely a thing. You don’t need to be a connisseur to detect it.
A decade or so in the past our local supermarket had a rash of it… to the extent that it became a family joke: we had a wine-opening song “Is it wine or…[expletive deleted]”.
Fortunately they fixed the problem with their transport &/or storage; haven’t encountered it for a few years now.
True that. There’s no mistaking a bad bottle of red. In fact, I dumped out a bottle of Portuguese red not long ago after one sip.
I’ve never encountered a corked wine, but I’m very familiar with skunked beer. try this experiment:
If a skunk-like smell does not immediately slap you in the face, then maybe you don’t have the skunky smell detecting gene.
“Skunky” and “Corked” are a thing and they denote something wrong.
It’d be cool if rotten eggs didn’t bother or you didn’t even notice but it is also an indication you should not consume that product.
Skunked beer is specifically a reaction between light and hops in beer. Isohumulones in hops get changed into methylbutanethiol with the addition of sulfur from the beer.
Temperature fluctuations don’t cause it, rather clear/green bottles and light exposure does. That Heineken that @solost describes would be skunked prior to the temperature excursion, assuming it takes place in the dark.
Brewers these days rarely use clear/green bottles anymore, and some of the ones who do (Miller in particular) use hop extract products that don’t react with light. Others like some of the Mexican brands, were notorious for being kind of skunky every time. I don’t know if this is still the case or not- I mostly try to get cans whenever possible.
According to Google, corked wine:
“Corked” wine refers to wine that has been tainted by a chemical compound called TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole), resulting in an unpleasant musty, moldy, or wet cardboard aroma and flavor. It’s a common wine fault that can affect any wine, regardless of quality or age.
What causes corked wine?
TCA forms when a natural cork (or sometimes other winery materials) comes into contact with certain fungi and chlorophenols (often from cleaning products). These fungi convert the chlorophenols into TCA, which taints the wine.
I may have had a bottle or two in my lifetime, but it’s much more likely that you’ll find a bottle that’s just been improperly stored and doesn’t taste right, than actual corked wine.
Twist off caps and synthetic corks absolutely eliminate the phenomenon, and that’s largely why many wineries have moved in that direction.
Huh…I knew green bottles were a contributor to beer going bad, but I had always heard that temperature fluctuations were the main contributor to skunkiness. I guess I got skunked with that info.
I haven’t had any ‘skunked’ beer since the '80s, usually in 12-bottle assortments of imported beers. I’ve tasted corked wine, and it was much less objectionable than skunky beer. (Of course I drank the beer anyway.)
Absolutely agree with Heineken (I only drink Heineken 0.0 now, and even the non-alcoholic has light skunk on the nose.) Corona, as well. I get it from bottles of Pilsner Urquell, as well (at least here in the States. Don’t remember there being an issue abroad). In brewing circles, it’s also known as being “light-struck” for reasons given above.
Now, I can’t find conformation for this, but I swear I heard some brewer intentionally skunking its canned line of beers because drinkers have associated the light-struck flavor of it with the brand (and I thought it was Corona), but Googling isn’t turning up anything and Chat GPT is telling me no one intentionally skunks their beers, so this may just have been an urban legend in home brewing circles.
But, yes, skunk flavor and smell is obvious. It smells just like skunk. Just like those scratch-and-sniff skunk cards back in the 80s, or just like you might catch a whiff of driving through the forest.
When I lived in GTMO Bay, Cuba all the bottled Heineken beer tasted like skunk. The cheap canned beer that we would get for 25 cents from the vending machine tasted much better.