First recipe too sweet

Hi All,
I starting brewing from kits and on my 3rd brew I got brave, did some research and created my own recipe. It has been ferminting since July 22 about 2.5 weeks and tastes very sweet. I have included a run down of the recipe and actions to date. I am hoping someone can hepl me tone the sweetness down before bottleing

.5 lbs. Victory Malt
5 oz Flaked Barley
.25 Lbs, Light chocolate malt
.25 lbs. roasted barley

7 lbs of light LME
12 oz maple syrup
1/2 cup brown sugar

1 oz chinook 13%
1 OZ Golding 5%
1/3 oz cascades

safale US-05

1 lbs roasted pecans
1.5 tbls maple but extract

on 7/22
SO I dont have a 5g pot so I split the boil into3 seperate pots. for a total of 3.5G to start
the grains and pecans went in to steep
started boil added 1/2 LME and chinook
30 min added 1/2 of the Golding
10 min remaining add remaining hops, maple syrup and the rest of LME

Cooled in ice bath for 40 min added cold water to make 5 gallons.
O.G 1.061
added dry yeast and shook for 90 sec.

Fermed at ~65 edgrees untill 8/2 when I rackekd and added maple nut extract flavoring
Took a reading and looked to be 1.009

Let sit in secondary until tonight at ~70 degrees. Took reading and it went up to 1.013
I am not sure how it went up, but it tastes too sweet. It is almost like if southern comfort maed a beer sweet. I could not imagine drinking a pint of it.

Any thoughts ideas critiziam is welcome
was the recipe off to start?, can I pitch more yeast or do I just sit it in the corner at 70 degrees for another week, should I try dry hopping

Thank you

You had good fermentation, even at 1.013, that's very good. 1.009 is great. Maybe it was the maple?

I would say its from the maple syrup and extract you added. I think you want to use a light hand when adding stuff like that. My opinion about beers with adjuncts like fruit and syrup is I want to taste the beer first and have just a lingering note of the adjunct.

Your differing FG are probably due to CO2 in the sample when you took it. Try pouring your sample between two glasses about 20 times before taking a hydrometer reading.

Without having the time to run numbers, based on the recipe grain bill and hops it appears you did not have enough IBUs to balance out the sweetness of the grain and then the additions of the syrups added more sweetness to the recipe. Fermentation looks to be good, your first lower reading or second higher reading may just not have been accurate. I could be wrong on the balance thing, as stated no time to plug into my software now, maybe someone has a better idea but I think you wound up with a maltier beer than desired.

60 min of chinook should be plenty bitter. My money is on the extract added after fermentation. Flavoring extracts are VERY strong.


Also, I really hope it isn't really "maple but extract" because that sounds nasty

Wow good call on that. Maple nut. The other would definitely cause some off flavors. Any toughts on how I can balance out the sweetness?

I don't know what you can do at this point...it hit a good FG even at the 1.013 number. You could try a hop tea, boil some hops in water and add it at bottling.

I always brew my own recipes made in Beersmith and I never add adjuncts w/o brewing the base recipe 1st so I know how that tastes. Sometimes I will brew 5 gals, then split the batch and add the adjunct to half like I'm doing for my Marionberry Strong Ale now. So, if my beer comes out too sweet, I'll have it with and w/o fruit so I'll know it was either the fruit or a problem with the base recipe.

strambo said:

I don't know what you can do at this point...it hit a good FG even at the 1.013 number. You could try a hop tea, boil some hops in water and add it at bottling.

I always brew my own recipes made in Beersmith and I never add adjuncts w/o brewing the base recipe 1st so I know how that tastes. Sometimes I will brew 5 gals, then split the batch and add the adjunct to half like I'm doing for my Marionberry Strong Ale now. So, if my beer comes out too sweet, I'll have it with and w/o fruit so I'll know it was either the fruit or a problem with the base recipe.

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That sounds like a good precaution in the future. Maybe I will split the batch now and add some hop tea. Should I use more Chinook or cascade? I would hate to make it too hoppy

Depends on how much you like the flavor. You could always dry hop a few days with 1 oz of the cascade - should kill off most of the sweetness. Just make sure you to taste every day and rack the beer once it gets where you want it. If you set it and forget it, you'll probably go overboard on the hoppy side.

Making a new recipe and incorporating extract isn't easy to get right the first time. You will need to dial in the right amount and probably end up with a few brews which are 'great'. Expect that. It isn't something you can fix on the back end either. If you are looking for a beer with the extract flavor present, you intentionally dial back the hops, leaving a hop backbone. Especially with a maple note, which would probably not play well with a strong citrus nose, I suppose (I have never brewed a maple and never will). But in your recipe you have put in 3 ingredients which can give a strong note on their own (brown sugar, maple syrup, and maple extract). Hard to tell what you are tasting with those three. Experiment. Split batches using maybe just one or two with the pecans. Nothing wrong with making a marginal batch if it is in the name of science!

thank you all for the help. I took another reading and still got 1.013. Had a friend of mine taste it and found it was just very very mapley. It wasn't the sweetness. Would adding some hop tea help calm down the maple or will it subdue over time?
Thanks

I really think your best bet for saving it would be to make another beer and blend it. You could add some hop tea to cover up the mapley taste but it might even make it worse.

kwingert said:

I really think your best bet for saving it would be to make another beer and blend it. You could add some hop tea to cover up the mapley taste but it might even make it worse.

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THIS. If it has too much maple flavor, then adding hops will add bitterness, but not reduce the maple flavor. If you have the fermentation space, I suggest leaving this beer in secondary, and making a similar beer without the maple additions. When the non-maple brew is done, combine the 2 beers before bottling. This will dilute the maple flavor without diluting the entire beer or throwing the flavor out of whack.

+1 to making a second batch and blending it. Maybe go with a nice pomegranate bacon sour.

Pomegranate Bacon Sour???? That sounds horribly wrong on multiple levels. Is that even a real beer?