IIPA hops flavor/bitterness gone

I need help!
My IPAs are absolutely delicious a week after carbonation. They are PERFECT for about 2 weeks. Then the hops bitterness and flavor almost completely disappear, making the beer cloying and unbalanced. I understand IPAs need to be had young, but 1 month is insane!
Any suggestions? What information would be relevant for help?
So far this has happened on all my IIPAs, and I'm too new to brewing to figure this out.

Thanks for your help!

Lupuline Shift.

no, it's too sudden.
From one week to the next, my neighbors, brothers... all agree, the hops just melted out of the beer, and they are now oversweet and cloying...

Are you bottling or kegging?

Bottling, and my guess would be that my problems come from bottling.

I jet wash, soak in easy clean, dishwash on sanitize cycle, then dunk in Star San prior tp bottling.

I don't know man. Hoppy beers start getting worse the second they leave the fermenter. It's probably about right that your IPA's go downhill after a month in the bottle. Not sure how long your primary is, but I'm guessing the beer is 5-6 weeks old after they finally carb up. Six weeks is IPA life expectancy. What I've found to help is drop the yeast and dry hops fast by crash cooling if you can. My hoppy beers are always fermented with US-05, and it's done for sure after 1 week at 68F. Dry hop for 5 days, chill for two days, in the bottle after 2 weeks. The extra clarity helps the hops live a little longer. It also helps to be real careful about oxygen when packaging, oxidation jumps out of hoppy beers for some reason, and it mutes and contaminates the hop flavors and aromas.

smizak,
Thanks for the reply, it's giving me something to think about. I gave 3 weeks primary, 1 week second/dry hopp, 2-3 weeks room temp, 1 week semi-cold room (have a lukewarm basement...) before opening. So maybe after my 1st 2 weeks I'm starting to get subdued hop flavors? Does this also affect bitterness? Because my beers are also losing bitterness.
Can any infection cause this?

Post a recipe !

4% 6 0 Light/Pale Malt Extract Syrup
21% 2 13 American Two-row Pale
17% 2 5 Rye Malt info
7% 1 0 Corn Sugar info
2% 0 4 Amber Malt info
2% 0 4 White Wheat Malt
2% 0 4 American Crystal 80L
2% 0 4 Belgian CaraMunich
2% 0 4 Flaked Rye info
1% 0 2 American Crystal 60L info
Batch size: 4.0 gallons

My hopping schedule got erased from my records,
but it's roughly:

cent .33oz 60min
chin .33oz 60min
war .33oz 60min

casc .5oz 20min
amar .5oz 20min

chin .5oz 10min
casc .5oz 10min

casc .5oz 0min
cent .5oz 0min
ama .5oz 0min
simco.5oz 0 min

Dry hop 7 days 2 oz casc

my take on Hebrew Lenny's RIPA. My absolute favorite beer. Two weeks ago, I woulda said cloned...
now it tastes really sweet, with some hops but not the crisp hopbomb..

Any infection will mask hop flavors, but will not directly subdue hop flavors and aromas without adding it's own, which would be apparent. Bitterness will also drop out, though not as quickly as aroma and flavor, in my experience anyway.

Are you using the Chico ale yeast(1056/001/US-05)?. Most beers will be more than done after a week. I would suggest zeroing in on when your beers hit terminal gravity, then maybe give it a day or two more for the yeast to clear up and clean up. I actually like to dry hop with a little yeast still in suspension, when it gets chilled the yeast drag the leftover floaties down with it fast. I know I'll prolly get beat up by the "3 week in primary!" Nazis, but that's just a rough guideline for new brewers who probably didn't pitch enough yeast and have no clue what finished beer looks like in the fermenter. Don't dryhop for more than 5 days, no point.

I give away a lot of my hoppy beers and drink it up fast, that's just the way it goes, they do not age well. Still worth the effort, after you tasted your fresh, hoppy homebrew you can tell that most stuff you find in a store is past it's prime.

I am also experiencing the pain of vanishing hop flavor. I brewed an IIPA that was my first beer I would put up against any commercial brew. It was flat out awesome. After 5 weeks in the bottle it had lost it's hop flavor and now it's just a mouthful of hot alcohol (9.5% abv) and malty sweetness. I am going to start moving my IPA's along much faster. This IIPA had a 1 month primary and 3 weeks in the bottle before I started drinking them.

so you guys think it's just a matter of time? That's good to know, I haven't slept for 2 days!
How do professionals keep theirs so hoppy?

and yes, Chico strain. Gonna try Denny's though.

I think my IPAs also start losing their hoppiness right after brewing. Therefore, I cram as much in there as I can! Seriously, I've had Hopslam that was a little over 3 months old, and the loss in hop flavor was noticeable.

wow, but can one week to another be so blatant?

If you can refrigerate your beers as soon as they are finished it will help them hold out a little longer.

I've had IPA's do this on occasion. I notice if I don't really dose the hops out in the last 20 or so minutes of the boil I get this after just a few weeks in the bottle. BTW I don't really pay attention to IBUs in my IPA's. I usually just go wild. The currently kegged IPA has 3 oz of cascade and 2 ozs of Chinook in the last 20 minutes. It is pure grapefruit juice and is 3 months old, yum. Now if I bottle anything I test the carb. Only after I am satisfied that it is carbed up I put it in the fridge. This helps to keep the hoppy goodness longer. Also, if you keg, just re-dry hop the keg. This helps a lot as the olfactory senses also impact taste.
IMO you did not use enough hops for IIPA. I would have at least doubled all those.

I don't get it.

Slight aroma loss, but my latest IIPA is still too bitter for SWMBO(and that is saying something) 6 months in the bottle.

Stone ruination must sit in the bottle for a while. It still packs a punch.

yeah, I'm on the fence. I agree that I need to drink them quicker. But from perfect to crap in one week?!!!

Those 60 minute additions don't look right to me. I do 90 minute boils and my IPA has *3.5oz* Tomahawk (~14%AA) added at the start of boil. I also add TONS of late and flame out hops and dry hop with an additional 4oz. (OG=1080).

1 week will not make a drastic difference in hop flavor/perception. Hoppiness fades with time, but it it's as significant a change as you're suggesting, I'd wonder if it's your water. I have bad tap water for brewing here; your NYC water may be better.
If it tasted good at first, it ought to taste much like that for a while. Though it's good to move hoppy beers along quickly, I don't think age is your issue here.

You might want to try dry hopping and bulk condition in a keg simutaneously and then bottle directly from the bulk conditioning tank (i.e. the keg).

I usually throw a pinch EKG into my ales at this step and the hop flavour and aroma doesnt really seem to die. I also keep tabs on my water chemistry. The sulfate ppm level can have quite the perceived effect.

On my most recent IIPA I did 8oz in the boil and 3 oz in dry hop. It had 2oz of simcoe at 60 and another 1.5oz at 30min.Then the rest were late additions. I think part of it might be that after the beer matures a bit the small amount of hops dies rather quickly.

I recently had some Troegs Nugget Nectar that they "found a few left over kegs of" and it had certainly lost it's hoppy bite. It was still hoppy but not like it is in February when it's fresh. It's brewed around Jan and released through March. So the growler I had was four going on five months old.

Yeah your 60 min additions look off.

What were the OG, FG, and estimated IBU's?

Well, here's an update: I had a bottle of DIIPA last night, and it was still hoppy and bitter. So AGE is NOT the issue, as that would affect ALL bottles of the same batch.

So what issue would destroy say 30% of my bottles and not the other 70%?

Water? infected bottles?

I appreciate all your input, as I cannot let this problem continue!

How was the carbonation level across all the bottles? Have these been stored in the fridge?

great carbonation, as for fridge, I place them in a couple days before drinking. Unfortunately, once my bottles have carbed, they go into a basement at 60 F, which is not very cold, but the best I can do...

By the way,


OG 1.09
FG 1.016
IBU 100

That changes things. Only thing I can think of besides a bottle infection would be something you recently ate that screwed with your taste buds. How could it be your water if the water used in the batch was all the same water? I know that with me being a cigar smoker burning a smoke for an hour or more can really affect my taste. Are the bottles all the same size? Using all the same caps, not mixing oxygen absorbing caps with plain crown caps? Is it mixed between two cases or does it tend to happen in the same case? I'm trying to think of any variables that could be different between bottles. I know that sometimes roughly my last six bottles or so of bottle conditioned brews behave slightly different than the rest of the batch.

This is no slight difference between bottles. my good bottles I would put up against any commercial brew (almost), my iffy ones made me want to cry.

I am not mixing caps, and the bottles are the same size. And this has happened to all my highly hopped beers.

I have an ipa that still has good hop flavor and bitterness, after 6 months in the bottle. There must be an ingrediant or process problem.

Thanks Permo, any ideas?
I'm out of them...

You're not using any finings, right? Finings have been blamed for stripping away hop character, but I really don't have much experience with them.

Jboggeye said:

I jet wash, soak in easy clean, dishwash on sanitize cycle, then dunk in Star San prior tp bottling.

Click to expand...

Problem one is the jet dry. That kills head retention.

Have you tried one of the "weaker hopped" beers a month or so after trying them @ 3 weeks?

Have you checked your water profile?

I don't use jet dry, sorry, I meant the bottle jet washer that attaches to the faucet. This problem only seems to happen to my IPAs, not my other beers, I don't think.
I haven't checked my water profile. What could the water profile do to hops? And wouldn't it be for the entire batch versus 30% of them?

Jboggeye said:

I don't use jet dry, sorry, I meant the bottle jet washer that attaches to the faucet. This problem only seems to happen to my IPAs, not my other beers, I don't think.
I haven't checked my water profile. What could the water profile do to hops? And wouldn't it be for the entire batch versus 30% of them?

Click to expand...

I'm wondering if your dishwasher didn't get all of the easy clean out of every bottle; maybe the ones at the corners of the dishwasher didn't get rinsed as well. Clearly the issue is the bottles or bottling process, and not the brewing. Maybe rinse them by hand really well after the easy clean soak. The heat of the dishwasher is redundant anyway, as star san will sanitize clean bottles just fine.

Edit: Water profiles affect the pH of the mash, as well as hop utilization/flavor. That's not your issue here, though, as some of the batch came out well.

So you are saying that an easy clean reside in the bottle could be a problem here?

I'm with smokinghole on this one. Day to day, and even within one day, fluctuations in your own senses can really change your perception from bottle to bottle, especially on a hoppy beer. I've noticed on some of my hoppy beers that they'll taste spot on one day, then lackluster another day, then fast forward a few days and they're spot on again. And this is all from one keg.

It can depend on time of day, what you had to eat that afternoon or even morning, smoking, if you were congested on one day b/c of a cold or allergies, etc. etc.

Not saying some of these other factors might not be at play, but your senses can often play tricks on you...

thanks moti_mo, I had one of my "bad" bottles that I recapped and it tasted fine. Not perfect, but certainly not "bad" like it did 4 days before hand.
So you are right, I am definitely experiencing taste/sense issues, although I believe there may be other factors involved as well...

What's the remedy? Brew better beer?