tektonjp

Recipes 

wondering in hindsight why you didnt just add DME to your boil when you realized the gravity was off.

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Tempest Bebende!

Polboy

Recipes 

i know something about mellowing bitternes with time and it requires a long long time, in october i brew rather big beer and i washed grain in mash tune with 2nd 5gal sparge getting 5gal of lower gravity wort (1.05 after boil if remember correctly). After i was done with boil of a big beer i used the same BK with trub and hops leftover and boiled small beer for an hour with minimal addition of fresh hops, i wasnt thinking hops from first beer would add too many ibus but hell they did, small beer is bottled for 3 months and carb at 3 vol of co2 and its still hard to drink, actually i dont think bitternes changed over 3 months in a bottle, i have it once in a while usually as a beer no4 or 5 when i need little hoppy pick me up thingy

WeirdPete

Recipes 

Last time I brewed, I boiled off too much volume and only ended up with a little over 4 gallons (started with 7 pre-boil). So this time around I cut back on the burner enough to just barely maintain a boil and had a pre-boil vol of 7.5. But after 60 minutes I still had 6.5 gallons and decided to crank up the heat and boil off another gallon or so. It made sense after having a few beers.

Even if it turns out ridiculously bitter, I've brewed worse and still drank it. Much worse.

gordsellar

Recipes 

I may be quite late to the party, but another way to "fix" the problem would be to blend the beer. You could just brew up another California Common using the same grain bill and underhop it -- put nothing or only a tiny bit at 60 min, and then heavily late-hop it for a ton of flavor and aroma, making sure that the bitterness is still far below what you'd want in a California Common. Then blend the two beers; if you did it right, you might end up with something that not only has the right bitterness, but also is brimming with the aroma and flavor you want.

(I've done this before, to fix over-spicing, rather than over-hopping, as well as just to blend two beers together that go well; in fact, I've also used a very dull beer to bring up the ABV on a flavorful but thin beer. Blending can be a great way to fix problems. I'll admit, it's not guaranteed you'll get two beers that will mix well, but chances are much better if you're using the same grain bill and the same hops.)

And it is possible to get the beer very flavorful hopping heavily but only in the last 15 minutes... but from the results of an experiment my brewclub did a while back, you'll probably want to dry hop anyway. (For some reason, hopping beers exclusively in the last 15 minutes seemed to make the aroma less powerful than we'd thought. No idea why.)

Ultra-Medic

Recipes 

Wouldn't the extra boil also contribute to excessive melanoids?