Log through Filebeat has hex values, but direct to Logstash does not

[bladerunner512]

ELK 6.0.0/Filebeat 6.0.0

Logs are single line json:
{"msg":"Logger in Debug mode","sev":"DEBUG","ts":"2017-11-15T19:38:44:0223Z"}

This works fine:
$ nc localhost 5044 < json-log.log

Same file put in Filebeat log directory has hex values:
@version:1 host:dockerelkmaster_filebeat_1.dockerelkmaster_elk @timestamp:February 1st 2018, 16:54:21.862 @metdata.ip_address:172.18.0.5 message:2W\u0000\u0000\u0000\u00042C\u0.....etc.

filebeat.yml:
filebeat.prospectors:

• type: log
  encoding: utf-8

  enabled: true
  paths:

  • /tmp/*.log

output.logstash:
hosts: ["logstash:5044"]

[adrisr (Adrian Serrano)]

Can you share a sample log file which exhibits this behavior?

[bladerunner512]

The line mentioned above is the log file contents:
Logs are single line json:
{"msg":"Logger in Debug mode","sev":"DEBUG","ts":"2017-11-15T19:38:44:0223Z"}

[bladerunner512]

Since log file are all JSON I've removed logstash in filebeat.yml and replaced with elasticsearch:

#output.logstash:
#hosts: ["logstash:5044"]

output.elasticsearch:
hosts: ["elasticsearch:9200"]

This works great, but would still like to figure out issue with Logstash for possible use in the future.