very, very bitter beer

It seem that anytime I make a lighter style beer, I get very, very bitter beer.

You take a drink and think...pretty bitter.

And then, the bitterness just hangs there, and intensifies.

By the end of the pint, your bitterness tastebuds are just sort of fatigued, and it is not near as bad.

I don't think I am over-hopping my beer, but maybe I'm just getting better hops utilization?

I have used either cascade or amarillo as bittering hops, ususally 1 oz of pellets for an hour for a 5 gal batch. Alpha is usually less than 8%.

I usually don't boil my flavor hops for more than 15 minutes, usually saaz or hallertau (sp?) with lighter beers.

Is it possible that something else is causing the bitterness? or do I just need to scale back my hops?

I usually boil pretty rapidly. Should I turn down the heat?

How much water are you using in your kettle. In other words, what is your boil volume? If the recipe assumes a 2-gallon boil, and you boil 4, your hop utilization is way up there. The other posibility is really hard water which tends to bring out the bitters. You also might be steeping your grains too hot and pulling tannins.

I would suggest you try playing around with some brewing software, if for no other reason than to get a quick ballpark idea of how many IBU's you're getting in a given recipe with the amount of hops you use.

If you posted up one of your recipes I (or someone else) could plug it in for you.

An ounce of 8% hops boiled for an hour in a 5 gallon lighter (4% ABV) style would give you about 30 IBU. Which is too much for a light ale. Try http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator to get a handle on the numbers.

Bobby_M said:

How much water are you using in your kettle. In other words, what is your boil volume? If the recipe assumes a 2-gallon boil, and you boil 4, your hop utilization is way up there.

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Interesting.

I did not realize that this was a factor.

My recipe is an AE brew with a 2 gallon boil, and I'm doing an AG 5 gallon boil. Sounds like that is the un-accounted for variable.

Maybe I should stick to other people's recipes until I get the hang of this. Then again, I always did learn by doing (read, I'm stubborn and only learn through mistakes).

No, don't scale back your brewing size! Full boils definitely improve the beer. Maybe just download some free brewing software and plug in the original recipe. Then convert it to a full boil, and you'll see the hops utilization change. You can scale back your hopping a bit and the bitterness will be right!

Or, you can post the recipe here and one of us can run it through some software for you to help you out with the hopping.

Well, the recipe I was using was from Charlie Papazian's book.

It is the "whities pale ale" or something like that.

I made it as an AE beer, and it was pretty good, but my 2 AG batches were coming out very bitter. I kept missing the target gravity, so I thought that was the problem. Now, I'm thinking it was probably the boil size.

I'm about to pull the trigger on some brewing software, and hopefully that will help me out.

Judging by your name, I am going to assume you are in the College Station area. If so, we apparently have very alkiline water, so when mashing AG you get alot of tannin extraction at lower temps. Check your mash pH, that might help.

Nobody else asked so I will.

How old is the beer? How long has the beer been in bottles (or kegged)?

My APA's have a distinct back-of-the-throat bite that doesn't go away until the beer has had several weeks to mellow.