undrinkable batch of beer

so, it was my third batch. It's been two months by now, the beer is in bottles for two weeks.

I experimented with it.

I soaked in water and then roasted some pale malt. This procedure that I found somewhere on the net has provided me a very nice colored and beautiful caramel flavor malt.

it was 10 lb of regular pale malt and 1.5 lb of this home made caramel.

The beer would probably taste great if there were no hops inside.

My mistake was with hops. Interesting thing is that I used only 1.5 oz of hops. But there was some Magnum inside.

The hop schedule was like this:

0.5 oz magnum for 60 minutes
0.5 oz target for 15 minute
0.5 oz first gold at flame out


The beer is so bitter that it is undrinkable. I can bear it somehow, but someone else - no way. I can feel a hint of what the malty flavors would be without this bitterness, but the bitterness is so strong that it makes you spit it.

I don't get it. I don't understand. There was only 1.5 oz of hops in there. Of course, magnum is 14%, target is 13% but still......

What was the OG?

Leave it a couple weeks. It should mellow a bit more.

Or, brew up a lightly hopped stout and make black and tans!

DocRobinson said:

What was the OG?

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OG was 1.045

the recipe does not look like it should be too bitter.

Looks like an amber ale to me, right in the range and IBUs are lower that gravity units, so....

I can't explain it.

Something tells me that if the beer is really that bitter, he basically got insanely low extraction on 11.5 pounds of grain.

How did you mash? Were your grains crushed?

Walker said:

the recipe does not look like it should be too bitter.

Looks like an amber ale to me, right in the range and IBUs are lower that gravity units, so....

I can't explain it.

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do you think that leaving all the hop residue on the bottom of primary for
4 weeks would increase the bitterness somehow?

I really didn't try to separate the hops from the wort when I was transfering from boiling pot to fermentor

Let it sit for 6 months... It will be delicious.

hops left in cooled wort won't add any more bitterness. the hops need to be boiling to get the acids out.

DocRobinson said:

Something tells me that if the beer is really that bitter, he basically got insanely low extraction on 11.5 pounds of grain.

How did you mash? Were your grains crushed?

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It was a single infusion mash at 156 F for 60 minutes. I crushed the grains with some vintage found-in-the-attic corona-like mill...

the crush was very fine, and i used BIAB method for this batch

Possibly some of the caramel was scorched, it wouldn't take much.

My first thought is along the lines of David's, since you said you roasted your own malt.

Nope, it was the Magnum. I did the very same thing with 1.5 ounces of Chinook hops. They are about 15-16% AA.

The flavor was so overpowered with scorching bitterness, I cried.

After about a year, it finally was drinkable. Brew another batch. Let this one sit on the sidelines.

Jim Karr said:

Nope, it was the Magnum. I did the very same thing with 1.5 ounces of Chinook hops. They are about 15-16% AA.

The flavor was so overpowered with scorching bitterness, I cried.

After about a year, it finally was drinkable. Brew another batch. Let this one sit on the sidelines.

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so you think it was magnum... this was my first thought because I don't think the malt that I roasted had any effect, except improving the flavor....

I used it in other batches, and it turned out great.

but, still, I used only 0.5 oz of magnum. I really don't understand it....

Is the beer still cloudy? Is it possible that you're actually drinking the hop particles in the bottles?

I have been using Magnum as my bittering hop with a few batches lately, and finding that it is pretty easy to over-hop with it. I used just 0.75oz as the single addition in a 5gal brew of 50% Vienna/50% Munich (Wyeast 2565 Kolsch yeast), and it came out extremely bitter. Next time I do that recipe, I'm going with Saaz, which is like 1/3 of the AAUs of Magnum.

Perhaps Magnum is just too bitter on its own.

craven_morhead said:

Is the beer still cloudy? Is it possible that you're actually drinking the hop particles in the bottles?

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no way, the beer is perfectly clear.

the crush was very fine...

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Hm, is it possible that what you are taking as hop bitterness is actually excess tannins from the fine milling of the grain?

Llysse said:

Hm, is it possible that what you are taking as hop bitterness is actually excess tannins from the fine milling of the grain?

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I don't think so, I have another batches made with the same crush and they are fine.

I decided not to use magnum any more....