Boring Beer

My last brew, which I just moved to secondary yesterday, tasted a bit boring during the transfer. When I came up with the recipe, I was expecting an OG of 1.055, but ended up with 1.051 because the extraction efficiency on my specialty grains (and the 2-row I used for enzymes) was 50%, versus the 75% I had expected.

What can I do to empart flavor into the secondary? Could I boil some hop pellets to add some bitterness to it? (I only used 1/2 oz bittering hops @ 1hr.) Or maybe steep some specialty grains and add them in? What's a typical way to fix up a boring beer?

Thanks everyone!!

Jon

panacea said:

My last brew, which I just moved to secondary yesterday, tasted a bit boring during the transfer. When I came up with the recipe, I was expecting an OG of 1.055, but ended up with 1.051 because the extraction efficiency on my specialty grains (and the 2-row I used for enzymes) was 50%, versus the 75% I had expected.

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That's a pretty small deviation in OG. I wouldn't expect that to have any noticable impact on the flavor.

What can I do to empart flavor into the secondary? Could I boil some hop pellets to add some bitterness to it? (I only used 1/2 oz bittering hops @ 1hr.)

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1/2 oz of what varierty of hops? With bittering hops, what's important is the amount and the alpha acid content of the hops.For example, 1/2 oz of columbus at 15% AA would be three times as much bittering as 1/2 oz cascade at 5% AA.

What style of beer is this?

panacea said:

What can I do to empart flavor into the secondary? Could I boil some hop pellets to add some bitterness to it? (I only used 1/2 oz bittering hops @ 1hr.) Or maybe steep some specialty grains and add them in? What's a typical way to fix up a boring beer?

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IMHO, your beer will taste a lot less boring after it's carbed and bottle conditioned for awhile. Just leave it alone...5 gallons of boring beer is much better than 5 gallons of dumperbrau, which you risk creating by messing with it now.

Hey cweston!

It's an APA. (The same oaked APA that we were talking about a few weeks ago, in fact.) So there's a chance that the oak chips I'm putting into secondary any day now will fix the problem too. I used 1oz Chinook hops at 60min, which have an AA of 12-14%.

OK--that sounds more reasonable.

I agree with EP: leave it alone. Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, it'll still be beer and it'll still be better than most of the swill in stores.

If it's less than spectacular, post the recipe and your tasting notes and what y0ou think is lacking and you'll get lot's of feedback on how to fix it next time.

APAs are such a staple beer--you can spend your whole brewing "career" getting it right because you're probably going to brew a ton of them over the years.

I added the dry hops and oak chips with a bit of bourbon today, and already the beer in secondary is tasting a lot better. Unfortunately the bourbon bumped up the color so it's a dark looking APA now. It's amazing how a bit of color will have such an influence. I'm looking forward to the next few weeks -- it should be very interesting to see how it matures .

I pulled out a glass today from the secondary, 5 days after dry hopping and oaking. This is going to be a great beer! The color is actually perfect. The aroma is great too. The dry hops are making it more like an IPA than an APA, though. And the bourbon and oak are hardly detectable. I'm expecting the hops to mellow out a bit over the next week or two, and hopefully the oak will pick up a bit but I'm not expecting much. In the future, I'd prefer to add 2-3oz of oak chips to get a noticable oak taste into the beer.

Generally, I'm very impressed with the results and I'm looking forward to bottling and drinking in due time!

Now if only I could figure out what to put into my primary fermenter .