Which style haunts you the most?

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Which kind of beer(s) do you always seem to screw up?

  • Bitters

  • Brown Ales

  • California Commons

  • Fruit Beers

  • Stouts

  • IPAs

  • Wheats

  • Everything


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Kephren

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I love bitters. There is something so right about this simple style of beer. So why can't I manage to make one. I have tried three batches of bitter this year. All of them are simple recipes. All of the came out horrid. Everything I made this year other than bitters came out great, including a complicated apricot ale. I think the beer gods, for some reason, just don't want me making a decent bitter. Is there a style that you love, but just can't seem to work out even though everything else you make is good?
 
brown ales. I have a recipe that I am "ok" with, but I always find it to be lacking something and not as satisfying as it could have been.

-walker
 
Walker said:
brown ales. I have a recipe that I am "ok" with, but I always find it to be lacking something and not as satisfying as it could have been.

-walker

Since I've become a hophead, brown ales are SO boring to me. I owe it to Newcastle Brown Ale that got me started brewing though. I wanted to be able to make that. 2 of my first 4 batches were brown ales, and they turned out good enough to continue to brew. I look back on those beers now and realize how far my brewing has come since then though.
 
Any wheat ale with fruit in it. Every summer I try a few times to make a cherry or raspberry or bluberry wheat and it just never comes out how I'd expect it to.
 
I'm not sure what goes wrong. I had one that was extremely bland... lacked any body or bitterness. Might as well had been drinking iced tea. I had one that was waaaay too malty. I'm guessing I used the wrong mash temp, although I kept it between 149-153. And the one I have in bottles now tastes like... well... fresh cut grass. I think that's from dry hopping with fuggles. It's mellowing out after a few months in the bottle, but still not good enough to give to friends.
 
I'm with Kephren. I've only brewed one ordinary bitter and it just didn't have th body I wanted. Like Kephren said, Iced Tea. Very, very mild. I added hop tea and 4 oz of maltodextrin along with DME when I primed. It's keg conditioning now. We'll see how the finished product turns out. It seems more difficult to make a low gravity brew come out with fullness I want.

My weizen is progressing nicely may be a little heavy on the banana right now but I'm expecting it to mellow a bit. My Scottish ales are better than you can get at the beer store for sure. My kolsch is still in primary but seems fine, color is great.

I'm brewing an oatmeal stout next. We'll see how that goes.
 
maybe mash in at a little higher temp, maybe 154-155 degrees. maybe add some carapils. maybe boil for 75 or 90 minutes......
 
Thanks, I'll try all of that on my next one. This one used John Bull extract for the base malt with a mini mash for the crystal with an equal amount of Marris Otter. I did the mini mash at 155 and John Bull is supposed to be highly dextrinous. Go figure.

Maybe the final product will be better than first tastings indicated. I'll find out on Thanksgiving.
 
Wit beers.

They're my favorite style, but I've yet to make a good one. I made my first Wit (an especially heavy one) several months ago and haven't cracked a bottle since probably August because it was friggin' nasty. The second was made for a friend (which he drank almost all of without me) and had blotchy carbonation. I'm on my third now and HOPING that I finally made a good one. To be honest, the first two attempts were home-made recipes at a time when I shouldn't have been freestyling. Now I'm following the Hoegaarden clone recipe and HOPING it works.

I'm planning on boosting the DME used to prime it because I'm tired of undercarbonated beer.
 
Cheesefood said:
To be honest, the first two attempts were home-made recipes at a time when I shouldn't have been freestyling.


This is a good point I think.
I SO wanted to do my own recipes and really didn't understand it enough to do it well. I'm still not where I should be, but I'm learning that art. Slowly.
 
ORRELSE said:
This is a good point I think.
I SO wanted to do my own recipes and really didn't understand it enough to do it well. I'm still not where I should be, but I'm learning that art. Slowly.

I don't have experience for squat, only on my 5th batch but I've yet to make other than my own recipe. I don't want to copy anyone but rather make my beer uniquely mine. Sure, I use the BJCP style guidelines when building the formula and I look at a whole bunch of recipes before proceeding, especially those who've got competition credits behind them. Still I know that it is the brewer and process that makes the beer more so than the sum of the ingredients. Just a recipe doesn't get a really good beer done.

I've yet to really botch a brew up but I know that my turn is comming. Next up is an Oatmeal Stout of my own design. I know what I want to achieve I hope I can get it done. The ingredients are on their way.
 
ScottT said:
I don't have experience for squat, only on my 5th batch but I've yet to make other than my own recipe. I don't want to copy anyone but rather make my beer uniquely mine. Sure, I use the BJCP style guidelines when building the formula and I look at a whole bunch of recipes before proceeding, especially those who've got competition credits behind them. Still I know that it is the brewer and process that makes the beer more so than the sum of the ingredients. Just a recipe doesn't get a really good beer done.

I hear you, but my Wounded Thumb Wheat was just a little too ambitious. I was trying to make a high-gravity Wit beer flavored with honey and several types of fruit juices. I had no experience brewing a good Wit to that point. I didn't even realize that I needed to strain the hops out of my wort, so I created a mess where the hops, orange peel and coriander sat in the primary for 2 weeks. I checked it relentlessly. My sanitation techniques were useless

I just tried a bottle for the first time since July. It's better than originally, but still undrinkable. I'm thinking that it might end up good in about 6-9 more months.
 
Hey, homebrewing is about experementation and adventure. I botteled my Hefe Weizen today after watching it fall clearer and clearer for the last couple of days. I did a hydrometer reading today and saw that it hadn't changed since I transfered it to secondary last Friday so I primed it for 3.5 volumes of co2 and started bottling. 12 oz bottles this time. While bottling my first case, I kept thinking about that hydrometer sample I'd drank. The banana had faded in the secondary and I had a bit more clove flavor. I had some HopTech peach extract stashed away and decided to modify the second half of the batch. I boiled up a cup of water added 3 oz of lactose, cooled that and stired that in with 2 oz of the peach extract and bottled that.

I know that fruit flavors are not usually associated with hefe but rather US or Belgan Wheat but peach just matched up so well with the clove I had to give it a go.

Sure smells good anyway.
 
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