Encoding issues in browser but NOT in rails console

Another Rails 3 encoding issue for ya'll.

I have this code in a controller:

@page_title = @episode.podcast.name + " » " + @episode.title.force_encoding("utf-8").truncate(25)

When I load the page in the browser I get this error:

**incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8**

However, when I run the same code in rails console, I get this:

"Jenner y Balmís, médic..."

My limited knowledge tells me this开发者_StackOverflow is related to a configuration or environmental issue.

Are you specifying the characterset in a meta tag in your layout? This is one from a multilingual project I did. Its using HAML but you get the idea:

%meta{ :"http-equiv" => "Content-Type", :content => "text/html; charset=utf-8" }