need help fixing my first failed beer

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NorthSide

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i brewed a brown ale about a month ago using home grown centennial hops, and i am now kicking myself for not doing a test batch or hop tea first. i now have 5 gallons, kegged, carbed, and ready to be drunk, but of a beer that to me does not taste good. the homegrown hops provided no flavor or aroma, and almost give it an old vegetable flavor. i tried dry hopping in the keg with 3 oz of store bought hops, but that only added some aroma...

any ideas as to how i can make this beer drinkable?

here's the recipe:

11.00 British Two-row Pale
0.75 American Crystal 80L
0.75 Belgian Biscuit
0.38 American Chocolate
1.00 Flaked Barley
 
I would try blending it with another beer. The dry hopping may add additional vegetal flavors, so i would rack the beer off of them after 3 days or so.
 
I recently did a beer where I completely forgot to add the bittering hops. I boiled a half gallon of water with 2 ounces of hops for one hour and added it to primary (after cooling to room temp) on the second day. After bottling, the beer started very bitter, but mellowed nicely in a few weeks.
 
thanks for the replies! i removed the dry hops and i'm going to let it sit for a while and hopefully brew something else. maybe blending will be the answer. or i was thinking of adding some bourbon infused with vanilla or oak... i'm just mad at myself since this is the first batch i've brewed in years that i wasn't happy with.
 
dbsmith said:
I would try blending it with another beer. The dry hopping may add additional vegetal flavors, so i would rack the beer off of them after 3 days or so.
Click to expand...

Yeah because 10 gallons of bad beer is what he wants....


Cut your losses. See if its gets better over time, if not learn from the mistake and make room for better beer by dumping it.
 
Xpertskir said:
Yeah because 10 gallons of bad beer is what he wants....

Cut your losses. See if its gets better over time, if not learn from the mistake and make room for better beer by dumping it.
Click to expand...

He kegs and if he can have more than one beer on tap at the same time then blending could be a good fix. You can easily pour a half pint and top off with another beer.
 
i do have a 3 gallon test batch in primary right now that's a smash with golden promise and homegrown centennial hops, if that one turns out maybe i can do a little blending. otherwise it's probably going down the drain and i'm back to the drawing board.
 
you could make it a fruit beer of some kind. I have a ~7% belgian that had no hop aroma and came out to around 10 IBUs. I did this on purpose because I was aging it on black peppercorns and pineapple. Everyone who's tried it has loved it. You could use something like blackpepper, or even jalapenos to give the beer the bitterness that its missing. As it's a brown ale, some coffee could help with this too and blend better. Frangelic Brown from Founder's uses hazelnut coffee and is pretty good.
 
Xpertskir said:
Yeah because 10 gallons of bad beer is what he wants....


Cut your losses. See if its gets better over time, if not learn from the mistake and make room for better beer by dumping it.
Click to expand...

Who's to say it will be bad? Blending is a master technique and it's easy to try. There is no reason to waste beer unless it's beyond help. Try blending the beer with another beer in different proportions in a pint glass, using a beer which has the aspects you are missing/wanting (e.g. hop flavor/aroma). Once you figure out the correct proportion and/if you like the beer, then you can mix kegs if you want (Avoid oxidation). The boiled hops in water technique someone mentioned is also a viable option if you decide the beer is that bad. Good luck.
 
NorthSide said:
i brewed a brown ale about a month ago using home grown centennial hops, and i am now kicking myself for not doing a test batch or hop tea first. i now have 5 gallons, kegged, carbed, and ready to be drunk, but of a beer that to me does not taste good. the homegrown hops provided no flavor or aroma, and almost give it an old vegetable flavor. i tried dry hopping in the keg with 3 oz of store bought hops, but that only added some aroma...

any ideas as to how i can make this beer drinkable?

here's the recipe:

11.00 British Two-row Pale
0.75 American Crystal 80L
0.75 Belgian Biscuit
0.38 American Chocolate
1.00 Flaked Barley
Click to expand...

dump that one and brew another. had i saved every bad beer i brewed for blending with some other (presumably) good beer i'd be up to my ears in bad beer. it's not that blending does not work, sometimes it does but who's to say it will work? some of the best beers in the world are blends (belgian gueze) but those brewers have hundreds of yrs of experience behind them, we're just gambling with our blends.
 
eastoak said:
dump that one and brew another. had i saved every bad beer i brewed for blending with some other (presumably) good beer i'd be up to my ears in bad beer. it's not that blending does not work, sometimes it does but who's to say it will work? some of the best beers in the world are blends (belgian gueze) but those brewers have hundreds of yrs of experience behind them, we're just gambling with our blends.
Click to expand...

There is no reason to dump it without even trying to fix it! It only takes a couple pints of a 'good beer' to see if it is feasible. Not to mention trying the hop in water technique. Who knows, maybe the resulting blend will take on an added malt complexity that didn't exist before as well. If you try to blend or try the hop trick and it still sucks then dump it, but you should at least try. I'm an experimenter by nature and this seems like an opportunity to learn.
 
thanks for the help. i have never dumped a beer. my first batch i brewed about 8 years ago was terrible, oxidation and infection, and i found someone who loved it. i gave this guy about 2 gallons of the worst tasting swill ever and he drank it all up. he must have no taste buds.

so, i'll probably figure out some way to either change or blend it to make it drinkable or find someone who likes off tasting beer.
 
Take it out...let it ferment in the wild to vinegar. Bottle em up and lable some malt vinegar as gifts for the holidays...:)
 

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