Beezy

Recipes 

I have had the opposite problem. I had a few beers finish like 1.006. I was mashing accidentally at like 146. The one had a pound of sugar added too. It was Belgian style so it worked out. I also add these nutrients. Everything seems to finish very dry for me. Working on trying to get body now.

step

Recipes 

I have a beer that I like to make that I always used a base of plain 2-row for and then one time I used pilsen malt as the base and it came out too sweet to me even with a low FG. I attributed it the malt and have gone back to 2-row and have my nice dry beer back even though the FG was within a point.

Yeast is also a question as I have played with different yeast in the recipe above and found that it makes a big difference in perceived dryness even though the FG was 0.1 degree plato different. For my last trial it was Wyeast 1968 vs 1056 and the 1056 seemed way drier even though they were basically the same FG.

Good luck...

OHIOSTEVE

Recipes 

I made this with 2 row and switched it to pilsen malt thinking I would get a cleaner profile. I have used notty and s-05 and prefer the s-05. This last batch I used washed yeast and made a starter, decanted and pitched.I think I may drop the grain bill as was suggested, maybe even lower than suggested and up the bittering just a touch. And make a bigger starter. I want the taste close but dryer. I hope I don't end up with a completely different beer...unless it is better beer lol.

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neomantra

Recipes 

Not sure I get the logic behind dropping the grain bill. You could do this but it's also going to lower your original gravity and alcohol content with minor affect to the final gravity.

Skyforger

Recipes 

I'm not confusing the two. It just seems to me the main problem here is that that beer is out of balance (at least I imagine it would be for my tastes), not that it isn't dry enough. Not enough bitterness can make even a reasonable amount of sweetness seem cloying. If it really is a dryness issue, then I agree that switching strains and/or upping pitch rate would probably be the first thing to try.

CTownBrewer

Recipes 

I agree. If you have an overly sweet beer, a way to balance it out is to add more bitterness. By the same token, if you have an overly dry beer, you can balance it out by decreasing your bittering hop addition. Bitterness gives the perception of dryness on the palette & it can mask the malt flavor.

For example, Jamil always talks about using higher hopping rates/IBUs in imperial beers to balance the cloying sweetness you can get from the malt/alcohol.

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gr8shandini

Recipes 

The other factor you might want to consider is carbonation. If your beer isn't fully carbed yet, it'll probably taste sweeter than it should. On the other hand, high carbonation levels (2.8+ vols) can make a beer taste much drier than it actually is.

drhookmec

Recipes 

The idea of cutting back on the malt is to trim down the malty sweetness
of the beer and make the beer not as heavy more drier and waterery in flavor.

In a lighter beer such as this adding more hops
is not the way to go cause all your going to do is add more bitterness and end up giving the beer an unpleasant hoppy after taste.

If your concerned abought alcohol percentage
you can adjust that by adding
some rice syrup solids during the boil.
The rice solids will only add alcohol
and not effect the body of the beer at all.

tim

JRems

Recipes 

If you like it as is, and don't want to change the recipe you can add amalaze enzyme and watch it. when the fg lowers to your liking, crash cool and keg it. Also co2 volumes play a large role. I have a light cream ale that taste sweet at 2-2.5 vol of co2 , but crank it up to 3 volumes and it taste much drier and less sweet.

neomantra

Recipes 

Fair enough. Creating a balanced recipe can be trickier than it seems sometimes. I was just trying to address the issue posed by the OP.

You can have a beer very high in IBU that has a very low FG which leaves you with both a dry and bitter beer. You could also have a very high IBU beer with a high FG which gives you sweeter malt flavor but incorporates a high bitterness from hops flavor to balance that.

My point was only that the two variables (dryness and bitterness) are completely independent and utilize different factors (mash temp/yeast vs. amount of bittering hops) to modify each one.