First two AG beers seem to be acidic/bitter...

My first two all-grain attempts seem to be overly bitter. Very thick, very syrupy astringent, bitter taste in both. Not a pleasant bitter either...mind you I drink plenty of IPAs with high IBUs...

The first all-grain beer was a "pale" ale that ended up giving me insane heartburn...and now I'm drinking the first couple pulls of my pumpkin ale...same effect although only about half as bad.

Both had dry hop additions to secondary...and for both, I had trouble keeping my mash temps...156 dropped to 151 for the pumpkin and 156 to 149 for the pale ale.

Could the fact that I am having trouble holding temps result in bitter, bitter/acidic, heartburn creating brews?

Id look at your sparge temps more than your mash temps... anything over 170 can give you risk of tannin extraction, which it definitely sounds like your getting. However mash ph is something else to think about. Remember, 1 to 1.5 quarts per pound of grain. Are you using a cooler? If so, I recommend preheating your MT with hotter than usual water such as 170 degrees, then after ten minutes dough in. By the time you've stirred the grains in your usually where you need to be, and you can always add some cold water to drop the temp. Id rather start high, as it seems to be much easier to lower mash temp than raise it. But back to sparging, do you have an accurate thermometer? If you are somehow sparging at 180 you could easily have this off flavor...

My sparge temps are usually between 165-170...that being said, when I add my sparge water, it looks almost as if the water is boiling in the cooler (yes, I use a cooler for an MLT, by the way) for just a minute or two when I first add it before I stir - which confuses the hell out of me. There's no way that water is getting hot enough to cause it to boil once added to the cooler. I heat the sparge water to about 175-178 usually to get the 165 sparge temp...I use two different thermometers on brew day and all of my temps are the same with both...

Huh... well I know what the "boiling" is from, its because your grain bed is sealed, and when you pour the water in the air that's trapped in the grain rises up through the water, creating a boiling effect. The same thing happens on my cooler. I also use a cooler mlt

It may be airbubbles resurfacing,ive seen this and thought it was boiling too.

Thanks for solving that mystery...

My guess at this point is that it has something to do with the water I'm using. I don't filter the water and don't use any sort of ph stabalizer when mashing...

Guess what my next two upgrades are going to be?

I just bought a nice filter after having a serious chlorine issue... Morebeer has a really nice one. Considering I've been buying spring water at 85¢ a gallon its going to pay for itself after 4 batches

I have to bump this...just tried the first pull off my 3rd AG beer and I'm getting the same taste...it was a black IPA recipe...same sort of acrid, terrible even maybe metallic taste.

I can come up with two things...

Either it's the water...because when I was doing extract batches, I would top of with 2-3 gallons of bottled spring water...so now that I'm doing AG, all the water comes from the tap, unfiltered. Does anyone know of common off-flavors from having too much chlorine in their water?

The other is the fact that I've not yet cleaned my beer lines for my kegging system and I'm now on kegged batch #7 or #8. The first 4 batches or so that I kegged were extract and they tasted just fine from the taps...but now that I'm a few batches in and haven't cleaned them at all, it could be starting to catch up with...and the fact that it coincides with me switching over to AG could just be a coincidence...but then again, I'm getting the same taste from 3 different sets of beer lines/taps...

Either way, this taste is getting to be discouraging...I think the only reason my pumpkin ale is tolerable is because of amount of spices added...

Can anyone help? I'm sure there's more info I can give to help you help me so let's here it...

The John Palmer How to Brew online has an excellent and very comprehensive chart of off flavors and what causes them. Chlorine causes a strong medicinal plasticy "BandAid" flavor in the finished beer, or cloves.

What is your water profile? Should be easy to get a report for a city the size of Pittsburgh. That may give you some clues. It's probably not your water but stranger things have happened.

Any chance you have an infection somewhere in your system? Gotta keep your stuff clean.

How does the wort taste pre-fermentation?

I think I may have nailed it down to an issue with my kegging system...everything seems to taste, smell fine until it hits the keg...I've recently cleaned all my lines, I clean and sanitize my kegs in between each batch...what could be causing this?

I have a used Co2 tank tha I bought while my other one was getting tested. The guy at the shop said that someone brought it in to get tested but never came back to pick it up...it had been there for 8 months. Can CO2 go bad??

I would guess there's an infection in the keg or line, but the same taste/smell is coming from all 3 kegs/lines...the two best words to describe it are metallic and cabbagy...

kbuzz said:

I think I may have nailed it down to an issue with my kegging system...everything seems to taste, smell fine until it hits the keg...I've recently cleaned all my lines, I clean and sanitize my kegs in between each batch...what could be causing this?

I have a used Co2 tank tha I bought while my other one was getting tested. The guy at the shop said that someone brought it in to get tested but never came back to pick it up...it had been there for 8 months. Can CO2 go bad??

I would guess there's an infection in the keg or line, but the same taste/smell is coming from all 3 kegs/lines...the two best words to describe it are metallic and cabbagy...

Click to expand...

Co2 can't "go bad," but it can BE bad. If it had been filled with non-food-grade gas prior to you purchasing it - like at a mechanic shop/paintball supply/etc where little care is given to the quality of gas equipment - it could contain impurities like oil, grit, tainted water and even other gases.

Kerin said:

Co2 can't "go bad," but it can BE bad. If it had been filled with non-food-grade gas prior to you purchasing it - like at a mechanic shop/paintball supply/etc where little care is given to the quality of gas equipment - it could contain impurities like oil, grit, tainted water and even other gases.

Click to expand...

Wow...good to know...never would have guessed that CO2 was treated that differently.

I purged the "tank in question" and had it refilled at a gas supply shop recommended by my LHBS. Then I came home and cleaned the crap out of my two empty kegs and disconnected the kegs I currently have on tap so I could clean the crap out of the lines...

Also picked up all the parts to put together a filter system for brew day...if anything gives me this taste moving forward, I might just give up.

Bump for an update...

I'm having this problem again.

After the original issue popped up, I did the following:

-purged my CO2 tank and refilled with fresh CO2
-cleaned the crap out of my keg system...kegs, lines, everything!! And have cleaned and sanitized in between every kegged batch since.

Then I brewed two more beers - the first was an AG spiced brown ale with additions of cinnamon and vanilla to the secondary...I brewed it for a friend who organizes an annual fundraiser and I hate tooting my own horn, but it was delicious. I got nothing but overwhelming compliments all night. Then after that, I brewed the first of two extract kits that I got as gifts. Partial boil Rogue oatmeal stout clone. It was delicious...drinking it right now. Both darkish beers, no dry-hop, both kegged. Both brewed with a mix of bottled water for mash/top-off and tap water for sparge/boil...

So I'm thinking I'm good now. Two GREAT beers in a row...

Well then I brewed the Rogue dead guy ale clone. Partial boil...same water profile as the kit brewed above that was delicious. I missed my OG by a little...no big deal...but it was tasting just a little bland when I was kegging (forgot that I'm not that big of a fan of this beer - but hey, it's a gift)...so decided last minute to dry hop with an oz of Willamette. I have a bunch of it, why not? Might give it just little something...

The taste is back...cabbage/metallic taste...just awful...will be dumping shortly.

Could it be my dry-hopping? It's the one thing at this point that the bad batches have in common. Although I've used different kinds of hops, they all came from the same order from the same company and were vacuum selaed on the same day with the same process...and put it the freezer. Could they be freezer burned? The batch that I originally noticed this was dry-hopped in the secondary...and this recent batch was dry-hopped in the keg...but they both have the same taste. But those two batches of dark(ish) beers, also kegged with no dry-hopping were delicious. These hops were used for the AG brown ale batch and it came out great...but maybe the bittering/flavor additions don't effect the outcome as much since they are added during the boil and the "freezer burn" has a chance to boil off or something, maybe?

What the hell is my problem here? This is geting very frustrating...

I guess the obvious thing to do would be to brew a batch and dry hop with different hops, right? But do you think that's the problem here?

I want to help here, but I seeso many different descriptions of 'the flavor' that I cannot even begin to offer advice; acidic, bitter, cabbage, metallic. Those are all very different things, so....

Hang on to it and see if it settles out,it might be a hop issuse if it taste vegetable like.Send us some if you cant figure it out.Dont dump it. You did make a clone of a beer you didnt like though. Did it have pilsner malt?
Did you boil off the dms in a long enough boil, did you change your water profile.? Same yeast same temps? How long did you dry hopp?

Walker said:

I want to help here, but I seeso many different descriptions of 'the flavor' that I cannot even begin to offer advice; acidic, bitter, cabbage, metallic. Those are all very different things, so....

Click to expand...

Well they are all evident to some degree. I would say the cabbagey/vegetative aroma/taste is the strongest.

jonmohno said:

Hang on to it and see if it settles out,it might be a hop issuse if it taste vegetable like.Send us some if you cant figure it out.Dont dump it. You did make a clone of a beer you didnt like though. Did it have pilsner malt?
Did you boil off the dms in a long enough boil, did you change your water profile.? Same yeast same temps? How long did you dry hopp?

Click to expand...

I probably will, but it didn't settle out with the last bad batch. Even though I don't like dead guy, I'm pretty confident that this tastes nothing like it...and the dry hop addition wasn't even part of the kit/recipe. I'm pretty sure it did have pilsner malt as part of the "steeping grains"...but the previous bad batch didn't have pilsner malt at all...would pilsner malt play some sort of role in this? Boiled for an hour per my usual duration. Water profile didn't change...different yeast with each of the "bad batches", relatively same temps, yes. Dry-hopped for roughly ten days for first batch...this current batch has been sitting in the keg with the dry-hops for about a week.

I should also add that when I took a sample prior to kegging, it tasted "fine". So much so that I thought it tasted boring...hence the dry hop addition in the keg. This arom/taste was not evident prior to the kegging/dry-hop addition.

One thing that strikes me is the darker beers are good, while the pale beers are not. That makes me right away believe it's water chemistry- that your water is alkaline.

Have you any idea what your water profile is? If not, I'd get that ASAP. As a test, brew one batch will all reverse osmosis water from the grocery store or the big "water machine" in Wal-mart. Use 1 teaspoon of Calcium chloride in this water, and brew the same one of the beers that didn't come out well. See if it's fixed. If it is, it's the water. It not, it's something else. But I'd be willing to bet money that it's the water, and the alkalinity is the issue.

But the first bad batch was actually a black IPA with plenty of roasted malts...still got the vegetative smell/taste through the roasty qualities.

Also - I've brewed plenty of IPAs from extract kits back in the day with the same water profile (unless Pittsburgh water profile has changed that dramatically in less than a year) - and one of my best beers was a honey rye IPA back in the day...tons of IBUs and dry-hopped. Great beer.

And both of these bad batches have tasted completely normal prior to dry-hopping, but this unfortunately also means prior to kegging - which allows the keg system to remain in the mix as the potential issue.

So, I'm settling on the following list of possible culprits:

keg system vs. bottles - haven't had a good "hoppy" batch yet since switching to kegging. Dark beers have been fine. So...bad CO2? I've cleaned the lines like crazy, so not thinking it's this...plus many good batches have flowed through these same lines.

bad hops - the bad batches seem to be a result of anything dry-hopped - no matter the hop variety. But all were vacuum sealed in the same bags with the same sealer. Don't appear to be breached...but who knows.

using used muslin bags I've been reusing the same muslin bags from a while now...same ones I use for boiling, I also use for dry-hop. I rinse them after every brew day and spray with sanitizer before using. This is a variable I didn't think of until tonight. Could this be it?

You really should do Yooper's suggestion about water first. AG has totally different needs then extract. So no, Pitt's water likely hasnt changed in a year, but you are mashing grains with it (and all the complex chemical reactions) instead of boiling sugar water.
I have seen a ton of these threads where the brewer comes back with: Yep, it was the water!

Guys - I'm truly sorry for resurrecting this thread all the time, but I'm so depressed about this issue - still holding out hope someone can help me.

So I brewed another batch on 12/26 - a slightly bigger Dark IPA (is it a black IPa or an Imperial India Brown Ale? I don't really know). Used the following recipe:

14 lbs pale 2 row
1.5 lbs Honey malt
12 oz Roasted Barley
8 oz Carapils

1.5 oz Warrior - 1 hr
1 oz Chinook - 7 min
.5 oz Chinook - 2 min
.5 oz Chinook - flameout
1 oz Warrior / .5 oz Chinook - DH

Per some of the suggestions above, I decided to focus on water this go round. Rather than RO water, I decided to treat my mash with a PH stabilizer from my brew shop in addition to using bottled Spring Water for my mash and sparge (did not use any stabilizer in the sparge water). Other than having to boil a little longer than originally intended to get the volume down for my tiny kettle, everything went rather well. Added dry hop on 1/4 and kegged 1/14.

Granted I'm trying a really green beer here...I know most if not all of you are going to tell me to wait it out...and I plan on it...but I swear I'm getting the same cabbagey off-taste from the young samples I've consumed. I barely get any of that biting hop profile that I know so well from the many IPAs I've had. This is so discouraging.

I was sitting here thinking that maybe I'm just impatient...but then I remembered that back when I bottled, I would always try a beer within a week of bottling and it always tasted pretty good even that early.

Is this a kegging problem? Am I buying bad CO2? The owner of my brew shop buys from the same gas place and he swears by it. Kegs/lines are cleaned meticulously these days.

I think my next test batch will be using all "fresh" hops - as in not hops from my freezer. It would be a bummer to have to throw them all out, but would be worth it to have an answer to my problem.

Is there something else I'm not considering?

Two things I think of right away- one is the "stabilizer". that pH stabilizer isn't what it seems and it can't fix bad water. I'd still try ONE batch with RO water and see if it's fixed. you've got nothing to lose, but definitely do not use that silly stabilizer fake salt stuff. Adding more salt to bad water won't fix it.

Second, make sure you get a nice rolling boil with no lid, and a fast chill. If it truly is "cabbage"like, it's DMS and need a nice hard rolling boil and a fast cooling.

Yooper said:

Two things I think of right away- one is the "stabilizer". that pH stabilizer isn't what it seems and it can't fix bad water. I'd still try ONE batch with RO water and see if it's fixed. you've got nothing to lose, but definitely do not use that silly stabilizer fake salt stuff. Adding more salt to bad water won't fix it.

Second, make sure you get a nice rolling boil with no lid, and a fast chill. If it truly is "cabbage"like, it's DMS and need a nice hard rolling boil and a fast cooling.

Click to expand...

Wouldn't the DMS flavor show itself in the darker beers (non hop-forward/lower IBU) to some degree as well? I don't get this off taste with them. I get a solid boil going. I don't ever cover the pot. And I get the wort cooled relatively quickly (anywhere from 15-35 mins).

I will do a batch with RO water and a teaspoon of calcium chloride this weekend and see what happens. I'm just sick of churning out crappy batches of beer. I have a ton of Willamette that I wouldn't mind wasting, I guess. Maybe I'll do a SMaSH recipe using all Willamette?? Where can I purchase some calcium chloride? Brew shop?

I usually get dms from lighter beers, i did a pilsner extract that during the boil and after it was bottled had a potatoe likeness to it, some beers are meant to have this in it,ive thought that old hops may give this vegetable likeness to it i did a nugget pale ale that reminded me of a local ipa Galena Il, which uses galena hops which are similar to nugget, and had a vegetable cornyness to it wasnt shure if it was dms or the hops if they are old just too earthy or what? but i tried another and it wasnt in that one a week later,stragley.