Bottled My Brown Ale today, it tastes great, but has an interesting soy sauce aroma. Has anyone else experienced this?

I haven't had a beer with the soy sauce aroma per se but in a competition I once had a beer with a distinct aroma of Marmite. The two aromas are somewhat reminiscent of one another.

I assumed the aroma of the beer I tasted was somehow related to the yeast. Marmite is derived from yeast so that seemed to make sense. I'm not sure what the consensus was in that regard though; I wasn't judging that beer I was just called over to check it out.

I just did a quick and dirty search of Homebrew Digest and found the following following posting in Homebrew Digest by John Peed on March 9, 2007 (HOMEBREW Digest #5159):

...Alex, soy sauce appears to be a fairly common descriptor for part of the character that you get from a "malt reduction" (boiling a small portion of the first runnings down to some fraction). In a mild to moderate reduction (50% or less), you get mostly caramel richness. If you reduce more than that (or scorch the wort, as I did), then you can get into some really interesting flavors, some of which might be described as soy sauce. Traquair House has some of that character....

It sounds like this may have been the cause of your funky aroma.

Hmmm...I wonder if that was also the cause of the Marmite-like aroma.

- Scott

I find if I leave strong ales in the bottle for too long (1 year +)then they start to get a few new flavours moving in. One is the vegemite flavour (vegemite is my prefered yeast extract spread, I don't like marmite ). Another change is the gradual transition from hopped malt, to a flavour similar to cider thats been hopped with lawn clippings.

Soy sauce though, I can't imagine..