Latest brew is too sweet

I've just started my latest brew which was brewed as an IPA with coriander. It was in secondary for a good 2 weeks, and then put in a pressure barrel with a small amount of priming sugar.

It's been sitting in the barrel for, ooh... probably 2 months now, which is unusual for me, but I have my reasons. Tasting when I transfered to the barrel, it seemed pretty good. Still had that "young beer" bite to it, so I assumed it was all okay.

It carbonated well, and has a great head on it, which is a little unexpected with the coriander. Unfortunately though it's gone and got itself too sweet. Tastes wonderful, but you wouldn't want more than a pint in one evening because you'd be worried about your teeth falling out of your head.

So the obvious question is this: Is there anything I can do to knock out some of the sweetness, now that it's in a barrel? I'm not worried about losing pressure because I'm confident it'll self carbonate again. Just don't want to knacker it and end up with a bad batch... never had one yet, and I don't intend to start any time soon.


Also, does anyone have any suggestions for what I should make next? I have a distinct lack of inspiration today, and it's about time I got another brew on.

I think IPAs tend to taste sweeter as they age, because the hop aroma and flavor mellows, leaving you more aware of the malty taste.

Maybe you could try dry-hopping it (again?) in the keg, to restore that crisp hop aroma?

That might be a good idea. I do like my beers to pack a good hoppy punch, so I suppose a bit of dry hopping might do it.

Cheers for the help.

can you post the recipe for this corriander IPA? That might give us some more info about why it is so sweet (so you can avoid it the next time.)

-walker

dry hopping isn't going to make it any more bitter. Why not make a hop tea and add that? In fact, if you wanted to get real fancy then you could make a mini 12 ounce batch (probably with extract for simplicity) and hop it up real good and add that. You'd have sugar there to make sure it carbonates good and you'd bitter it as well.

Just a thought.. I too would like to see the recipe though. I used coriander in my latest wheat and have found the head retention to be nill.. I had no idea this was the coriander's fault. Why? Is it oily or something?

You can make a hop tea and add it to the batch or get some hop extract for adding to the glass then pour your beer onto it.

Thanks for all the help everyone.

Unfortunately I can't post the recipe because I'm lazy and never bother to write down exactly what I've done. Perhaps this will give me reason to start.

Cheers
Taz

what was your final gravity?

we had one that got stuck at 10.26 and was too sweet. i eventually poured a packet of Nottingham dry in the corny and it went off great, dropped to 10.10 and was a quite quaffable beer.

How would you do the hop tea? How much hops to water for 5 gal??? I have the same problem but not sure which way to go add hop tea or more yeast and try to kick off another fermentation cycle.

Before you consider a hop tea, check the gravity. If it's in the normal range - >1.015 then you should hop it, add a little at a time as you cannot undo it but you can always add more. If you've got a stuck fermentation then you should definately add more yeast.

edit: as I said before, I'd use some extract and make a mini wort if I needed to bitter up the brew. I'd be afraid you'd get poor utilzation or something off would happen if you just boiled hops in water. I dunno though, others around here seem to do it without any problems.

Lost said:

edit: as I said before, I'd use some extract and make a mini wort if I needed to bitter up the brew. I'd be afraid you'd get poor utilzation or something off would happen if you just boiled hops in water. I dunno though, others around here seem to do it without any problems.

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I second the idea to make a hop tea with some extract as ther quality of the bitterness might be different if you just boil the hops in water, due to the missing hot break. But I'm not really speaking from experience here.

Kai

Boil an oz. of high AA hops in a quart of water for 60 minutes. Utilization will be very high because you don't have any malt to block the extraction of the alpha acids. I draw a pint and add the tea 1/4 teaspoonful at a time until I'm happy with the flavor. 1/4 tsp per pint ~ 1.66 oz. per 5 gallons. Then just add the hop tea to the keg.