I don't know why, but his batch finished a bit sweet. I want more bite. I have lots of Hallertau and Northern brewer. Was thinking of boiling 2-3 ounces in three cups of water for an hour and adding it just before kegging. Will this help balance things out? Or am I stuck with a beer only my wife could love?
Has anyone tried "hop teas" to add bitterness?
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Okay, seeing as I got nowhere with answers... I took about three ounces of northern brewer pellets. Tossed em in a hops bag. Boiled them for an hour then passed them through a coffee filter. Added the sweet beer and WHAM I got a killer flavour! I can't believe it actually. This fluke has turned out to be a great learning opportunity.
Thunder_Chicken
Well-Known Member
I wish I had thought of this for my last batch. It was very malty and not quite balanced to my liking.
In theory you could add a bit of tea, stir it in, sample, and repeat until you got a balance that you liked. I'll have to remember that. This might actually be a great way to dial in a balanced quick no-boil extract brew; that's probably how the pre-hopped LME kits are assembled. This might help me make some full 5-gallon batches within my kitchen constraints.
In theory you could add a bit of tea, stir it in, sample, and repeat until you got a balance that you liked. I'll have to remember that. This might actually be a great way to dial in a balanced quick no-boil extract brew; that's probably how the pre-hopped LME kits are assembled. This might help me make some full 5-gallon batches within my kitchen constraints.
LOL!!!! 
I doubt it would do you much good. If you brewed a hop tea that was pretty much maxed out on bitterness, it would be what, about 100 ibu's? Adding a liter of the tea to ~20 L or so of beer would only give you a boost of 5 ibu's, and it would otherwise dilute your beer. Maybe that would be enough to balance out the beer, but I kind of doubt it.
Well, you might get a lot of flavor/aroma, but I just don't see that much bitterness coming out of it. You're not going to go from 30 to 50 ibu's that way.
Thunder_Chicken
Well-Known Member
If you have the carboy space, you could mix up about a gallon of extract solution of your original batch gravity, boil the hell out of the hops in that, and then either ferment that out on its own and blend it with your current beer or add it to your current batch and let the yeasts ferment it out. This wouldn't increase the overall gravity of the current batch of beer too much so hopefully it wouldn't take too long for the yeasts to get things down to FG again.
Apparently you can't get much more than 100 IBUs in any wort (alpha acids saturate the mixture), but this would give you 15-20 more IBUs for the batch and wouldn't dilute your beer (and would give you another gallon of beer!).
Apparently you can't get much more than 100 IBUs in any wort (alpha acids saturate the mixture), but this would give you 15-20 more IBUs for the batch and wouldn't dilute your beer (and would give you another gallon of beer!).
Harrydan
Active Member
I actually had this same problem recently with an imperial Stout. Only I left out a whole ounce of bittering hops during my 60 min hop addition. I didn't realize until I was about to pitch and I saw the unopened pack of EKG lying on the counter. I did something similar only added some DME as well to avoid diluting the wort. I boiled for 60 min and added the cooled contents to the carboy and proceeded to pitch after aerating. I thought it help a lot. Sure. It didn't give me the IBUs I would have gotten if I hadn't been a cotton headed ninny muggins. But it definitely helped. Might need to research this a bit more. Since it sounds like you beer was done fermenting maybe you could add your primer to the hop tea to avoid diluting the volatile fluids? Just a thought
Thunder_Chicken
Well-Known Member
Except that you can only get about 100 IBUs into your tea at best as the alpha acids saturate the water. IBUs are a measure of concentration. So if you pitch the tea into a fermenter with 100 times the volume you only pick up 1 IBU. If you pitch 1 gallon into a total of 5 gallons, then you get 20 IBUs. If you have to pitch that much tea, better to make it as wort so you don't dilute your beer.
There has to be more to this than the AA saturation point of water, as I once did essentially the same thing as the OP to save what had otherwise proved to be a rather insipid wheat recipe I pulled off a <cough> well-known homebrewing forum 
I boiled up some Magnum in two cups of water long enough to cook the creamy resins out of the hops, dumped the whole thing into the carboy, purged the headspace with CO2, swirled the jug to incorporate everything, let it sit for a few days, then crash-cooled and kegged it.
Night and day difference in the beer - for the much better. I'd have tossed the batch otherwise, it was that wimpy. Obviously I only have impressions to go on, but if I had to guess it started around 15 IBUs and ended up double that.
So, to me, two cups of "something" drove five gallons of beer quite a ways up the perceived bitterness scale...
Cheers!
I boiled up some Magnum in two cups of water long enough to cook the creamy resins out of the hops, dumped the whole thing into the carboy, purged the headspace with CO2, swirled the jug to incorporate everything, let it sit for a few days, then crash-cooled and kegged it.
Night and day difference in the beer - for the much better. I'd have tossed the batch otherwise, it was that wimpy. Obviously I only have impressions to go on, but if I had to guess it started around 15 IBUs and ended up double that.
So, to me, two cups of "something" drove five gallons of beer quite a ways up the perceived bitterness scale...
Cheers!
