I feel ripped off

So I did an IPA which had 8.2 lbs of LME, 1 lb of crystal, 3 1oz centennial hops additions, and one 1oz dry hop.

It tastes like Beer Tea. I know part of the problems was a mistake of mine. Somehow along my research I missed the little part about needing to crush the grains. So my 1 lb of crystal did not get crushed.

However, my hops were sold to me in little plastic ziplocs - meaning you could smell the hops through it. It's supposed to taste something along the lines of Bells Two Hearted Ale, but it's more like IPA Light. So I'm pretty sure the hops did that "D" word, yes? I fermented for 14 days, dry hopped for 7, this bottle was condidtioned for 19 days.

It sucks because besides the hops (which were 2.99/oz - so they probably knew they were selling hops the bad way), this brew store is fantastic, but also about 30 mins away. I don't want to have to go to 2 or 3 places to fill my bill. I shouldn't be subjected to that crap.

Even if the hops weren't properly stored (I'm assuming the ziplocs were very short term), it should still be ok. With 8.2 pounds of LME, it should be pretty malty, and not watery at all.

How long has it been in the bottle? Almost three weeks? That's really strange.

At $3 an ounce, I'd definitely let them know of your unhappiness.

I'm surprised your LHBS did not crush your steeping grains and that they sell hops in ziplock bags.

Are you sure the leafy stuff int he ziplock bag was hops?

find a brew club in your area and see if you can observe another brewer making some good beer. Get some samples. It will reinvigorate you and then go online and check out one of the online vendors (Brewmasters warehouse, austin homebrew, morebbeer etc). The kits they sell will get you setup.

Yes, Ed, I too am surprised. I was a bit overwhelmed, my first time being in a brew shop and I was all excited to get my stuff. But like I said, I didn't even know to ask to have my grains crushed, let alone do it myself. It was a pre packaged 1 lb bag. It is malty, but certainly lacking in body. It said to start grains with cold water, and bring it up to 160 for 10 mins. Here are my notes:

Double Hearted Clone

Brewed 5/14 (?) Rack to Secondary 5/29

Malt Base: 8.4 lbs LME
Specialty Grain: 1 lb Crystal 10iL
Hops 4 oz Centennial
1oz (60)
1oz (40)
1oz (5)
1 oz (dry-secondary)
Yeast: WL001 California Ale

Procedure:
Boiled 2.5 gallons of water and set aside in fermentor (do this early in the day)
Added 2.5 gallons (add 3 next time) cold water to boil pot and steeped 1 lb Crystal malt at 160 for 10 minutes
Added .5 gallon hot water to boil pot to bring it up to 3 gallons so there will be 5 gallons at the end of boil (this was done as a newbie corection)
Added 8.4 lbs LME to "crystal tea" and stirred thorougly.
Brought to a boil and added 60 minute 1oz Centennial Hops. (3/4 cover produces good rolling boil)
Accidentally added 2nd hop addition at 20 mins instead of 40 mins but immediately realized and removed
Added 2nd hop addition for 20 minutes 1oz Centennial Hops.
Added 3rd hop addition for last 5 minutes 1oz Centennial Hops.
Added 4th hop addition on 5/29 in a muslin bag. Swirled on 6/1.

Removed muslin bags of hops and squeezed with metal spoon and spatula (forgot to sanitize spatula on first squeeze)
Placed pot in sink of cold water, sanitized 1gal ziploc and put ice pack inside. Used as ice wand for a few minutes.
Wort cooled to 92 degrees in approx 15 mins. Added to 73 degree water averaged out to 82.
Aerated by shaking vigorously for 5 mins covering hole with sanitized thumb.
Filled airlock with boiled water, sanitized shaft.

***I'm wondering if I somehow "over sanitized". Sticking spoon and thermometer in sanitizer every time before putting it in the wort and resanitizing fermentor lid just before aeration. Do I need to let it air dry first?***

OG 1.060 (1.0629 adjusted for 82 degrees)
FG at rack: 1.014 (at 70 – need to adjust)

Thoughts: (6/1) DO NOT squeeze bag of crystal after steeping. This will release tannins…we will see how it turns out. Just let water run out of bag for a few mins. Next time, put a portions of specialty grains in gallon Ziploc and roll with rolling pin to crack malt then add to muslin. This is to release more starch. Wondering if enough water reduced off…sample tasted watered down, but it is flat, and the spoon was still hot...


Donner: Thanks for the advice. I live in Ann Arbor where there is a strong brewing culture and Brewers Association. I must say I'm a bit intimidated, being new and all...you think they have brew sessions? not just meetings?

Also another note: my beer is lacking head and I expected more carbonation. I dissolved 3/4 cup corn sugar in 1 pint of water, boiled for 5-10 mins and swirled it into my bottling bucked halfway through siphoning. When I was racking to bottling bucket, i was very careful to not let much yeast get off the bottom of the secondary yeast cake. Could I have not let enough yeast come though to eat the corn sugar?

make sure you stir after racking to the bottling bucket, you really want those sugars mixed. As someone else said, you give it three weeks at 70 degrees? Give it longer. It will mature and improve. Also, you chill the bottle down for a couple of days before opening after carbing?

I'm sure if you went to a meeting and asked announced you'd like to assist and learn, someone will likely invite you over to watch, help and sample. LHBS' also sometimes do teaching sessions on saturdays and such. It can be intimidating, but most brewers are nice and laid back. Heck, there are several michigan brewers here and they might know someone who'd teach you. See if the state has a group and post there or just put a thread in the general topics section. Never hurts to ask.

I get my pellet hops in little ziplock bags. The LHBS keeps them in big, sealed containers in a fridge and measure them out to order and put them in little ziplocks. Then I take the little ziplocs home and put them in a bigger ziplock, evacuate the air out of both and toss them in the freezer.

I'd rather get them measured out to order in ziplocks than be required to buy them in 2oz quantaties.

I did some calculations. It depends on your on the AA rating of the hops. With an 8.5 AA, you would get 33.4 IBUs. The style guidelines for an IPA are 40-60 IBUs.
I don't know how new this is to you, so I'll explain. Hops have alpha acids (AA) which make your beer bitter. The higher the number the more bitter the beer. Because of mother nature, even hops of the same kind may not have the same AA rating. Right now I can by centennial from my home brew shop with an AA of 8.5%.
IBUs are "International Bitterness Units." It's just a number which tells you how bitter a beer is. IPAs are suppose to be between 40-60, so even if you did everything right your bitterness is low for an IPA.

By not crushing your grains you probably lost a lot of the malty richness the beer is suppose to have. It's hard to imagine 8 lbs of LME tasting light though. Did you do gravity readings? Was the ABV correct? Was it light like a Coors light, or light like a Heineken? I'm guessing it should be more in the Heineken range. I'm just guessing though. I don't think bells 2-hearted is supposed to be very malty (unless you compare it to Coors). It does have a lot of hop aroma. Don't discount that you probably lost a lot of that crystal flavor.

Nice choice of beers to clone, btw.

only a 10 min steep, that feels a little short to me. I usualy do 30 min at 160 when i am using a recipe from my LHBS.

brian_g said:

I did some calculations. It depends on your on the AA rating of the hops. With an 8.5 AA, you would get 33.4 IBUs. The style guidelines for an IPA are 40-60 IBUs.

Click to expand...

I'm not at home right now so I can't run the numbers in Beersmith, but did you calculate that based on a 3 gallon boil? If not, his IBU's could be even lower.

bigmanbt, when doing a 3 gallon partial boil (which in turn increases the gravity of your wort until the full volume is reached), you get less hop utilization, meaning less bitterness is extracted from your hops. My guess is that this is what happened. Download the free trial of Beersmith from BeerSmith Brewing Software, Recipes, Blog, Wiki and Discussion Forum and plug all of your numbers into it to get a good idea of what you SHOULD have in terms of color and IBU's.

I did a Two-hearted clone a month ago, and with a full volume boil of ~6.75 gallons (adjusted for boil off), I added 4 oz. of Centennials at various points during the boil. My bitterness calculates out to around 55 IBU, still pretty "middle of the road" in terms of an IPA.

The Centennial pellets I got from LHBS were 9.5%, so a bit higher than you calculated. Yes this was a partial. boil, but this was a recipe from the LHBS that was made as a partial boil recipe. It's pretty sweet...they have have a whole binder of clones and other goodies if you come in on a whim.

I was pretty close to my gravities: 1.0629 down to 1.011. The alcohol is there, but you sure don't know it. Since it's light bodied, it goes down real easy. The color is there though...must have been Amber LME? Sure looks nothing like coors. I'll just have to do it again to prove to myself that it's doable.

I definitely need to get a quickie beer into the pipeline just so I can have a choice when I go to the fridge. Thanks for all your quick comments!

EDIT: Also wanted to get confirmation on my racking technique. When racking from primary to secondary and from secondary to bottling bucket, I tried to transfer as little yeast as possible. Only a small amount made it through from where the racking cane touched the bottom near the end of the siphoning. Should more yeast be racked so there is enough in the bottles to eat the corn sugar? I feel that my carbonation is a bit low, and it was in the fridge for at least 24 hours for a 19 day bottle.

This sounds like a bad experience. Living 30 min from the LHBS puts you in the arena to do some online buying. The vendors on this site are great and I recommend you give them a try. All the "kits" I have bought from them had excellent instructions and packaged well.

bigmanbt said:

EDIT: Also wanted to get confirmation on my racking technique. When racking from primary to secondary and from secondary to bottling bucket, I tried to transfer as little yeast as possible. Only a small amount made it through from where the racking cane touched the bottom near the end of the siphoning. Should more yeast be racked so there is enough in the bottles to eat the corn sugar? I feel that my carbonation is a bit low, and it was in the fridge for at least 24 hours for a 19 day bottle.

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There is more than enough yeast in suspension to carbonate your brew. I try to keep all of the trub out when I rack, and I am sure that nearly everyone else does as well.

You racked it properly in my opinion. you want to rack as little of the flocculated yeast (yeast cake) as possible. Unless you do something outrageous, like a 3 month cold primary, you will have plenty of yeast in suspension to carbonate. Alternately, if you lager for a long time, you may need to add some fresh yeast to get it to carbonate.

You might also look into the method of adding the extract late in the boil. Essentially you just add enough extract to the partial boil to make it up to your target OG, then add the rest right at the end to sanitize. This will allow for better hop extraction, this will help especially with the IPA. It will also help keep your color down.

hopvine said:

I'm not at home right now so I can't run the numbers in Beersmith, but did you calculate that based on a 3 gallon boil? If not, his IBU's could be even lower.

bigmanbt, when doing a 3 gallon partial boil (which in turn increases the gravity of your wort until the full volume is reached), you get less hop utilization, meaning less bitterness is extracted from your hops. My guess is that this is what happened. Download the free trial of Beersmith from BeerSmith Brewing Software, Recipes, Blog, Wiki and Discussion Forum and plug all of your numbers into it to get a good idea of what you SHOULD have in terms of color and IBU's.

I did a Two-hearted clone a month ago, and with a full volume boil of ~6.75 gallons (adjusted for boil off), I added 4 oz. of Centennials at various points during the boil. My bitterness calculates out to around 55 IBU, still pretty "middle of the road" in terms of an IPA.

Click to expand...

I used beer calculus
Beer Calculus . homebrew recipe calculator

I set it for a 3 gal boil. With 10% AA hops, I got 40 IBUs, which is the bottom end of an IPA. I wonder if someone converted a full boil recipe to a partial and didn't take into account hop utilization.

brian_g said:

I used beer calculus
Beer Calculus . homebrew recipe calculator

I set it for a 3 gal boil. With 10% AA hops, I got 40 IBUs, which is the bottom end of an IPA. I wonder if someone converted a full boil recipe to a partial and didn't take into account hop utilization.

Click to expand...

So at 9.5% AA (which he had), he would drop down a little bit more to 38. Sounds like this mystery is solved, the LHBS didn't put together a very good IPA kit from the sounds of it.

bigmanbt said:

I must say I'm a bit intimidated, being new and all...you think they have brew sessions? not just meetings?

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Brewers are a social bunch and absolutely love to introduce new people to the hobby. I understand you may feel intimidated at first but can guarantee that everyone will be more than welcoming and you'll learn 10x faster as you would on your own.

In my humble opinion, when you are first starting out and trying to get your process down, try to find the least expensive extract brews that you can find but will still enjoy.

You can knock out 2 or 3 batches of lets say a nut brown or a blonde ale for $25 or $30 each, get your process down, understand what you are doing and why. Then move on to the higher IBU (higher cost) brews that it sounds like you enjoy. Hops are very expensive and I'd be unhappy just like you are.

Chalk this up to a learning experience and I know that once your beer has been in bottles for a few weeks, it will turn out just fine.

Don't feel ripped off, you actually made beer. One you can drink and enjoy and say you made yourself. So it didn't turn out exactly like you wanted, that is the joy of changing it up and experimenting until you do find a way to make what you like. Everyone here has had mistakes or unexpected results, just chalk it up to learning and next time you will get closer to what your looking for. Until you really get some experience under your belt home brewing isn't a great way to save money on beer, until you get your process dialed in and buy in bulk. But that requires space to store the bulk grain, etc.

I would say I average about $40 per batch, which works to $5 a sixpack. Considering my favorite brew from a micro here costs $10 a sixer it is cheaper, but not buy much because I had to spend all day making it, a day bottling it, etc. My time is valuable so the cost is higher than just ingredient outlay (not to mention equipment purchases.) So don't beat yourself up to much about the $3 hops, after your 20th batch you will look back and chuckle

bigmanbt said:

Double Hearted Clone

Brewed 5/14 (?) Rack to Secondary 5/29

Malt Base: 8.4 lbs LME
Specialty Grain: 1 lb Crystal 10iL
Hops 4 oz Centennial
1oz (60)
1oz (40)
1oz (5)
1 oz (dry-secondary)
Yeast: WL001 California Ale................


Brought to a boil and added 60 minute 1oz Centennial Hops. (3/4 cover produces good rolling boil)
Accidentally added 2nd hop addition at 20 mins instead of 40 mins but immediately realized and removed
Added 2nd hop addition for 20 minutes 1oz Centennial Hops.
Added 3rd hop addition for last 5 minutes 1oz Centennial Hops.
Added 4th hop addition on 5/29 in a muslin bag. Swirled on 6/1.

Click to expand...

Hi bigmanbt,

Your recipe indicates a 40 minute boil for your 2nd hop addition so, if I'm understanding your actual procedure, it sounds like you initially added them 20 minutes after the start of the boil (which would have been correct), but then removed them and instead gave them a 20 minute boil.

This would also account for a considerable reduction in bitterness.

I don't think it's very rare for LHBS recipes to suck. They tend to cut corners, giving you a beer, not a great beer. For example, my LHBS sells a bunch of recipes with up to HALF sugar for beers that should not have any sugar added.

"Tea" flavor makes me think tannins.

bigmanbt said:

Procedure:
Boiled 2.5 gallons of water and set aside in fermentor (do this early in the day)
Added 2.5 gallons (add 3 next time) cold water to boil pot and steeped 1 lb Crystal malt at 160 for 10 minutes
Added .5 gallon hot water to boil pot to bring it up to 3 gallons so there will be 5 gallons at the end of boil (this was done as a newbie corection)
Added 8.4 lbs LME to "crystal tea" and stirred thorougly.

Click to expand...

I will assume the crystal was removed before the LME was added.

bigmanbt said:

Accidentally added 2nd hop addition at 20 mins instead of 40 mins but immediately realized and removed

Click to expand...

It may be less confusing when reading/using recipes if one gets in the habit of thinking about hop (and other additions) in terms of minutes left in the boil rather than minutes since onset of the boil.

Yeah, the way the recipe was worded required giving the adding/recording a second look: "Add Malt Extract, stir well to dissolve. Bring to a boil, add 1 oz Centennial Hops and continue boil for 40 mins. Add 1 oz Centennial hops and boil for 15 min more. Add 1 oz Centennial Hops and boil for 5 mins. Remove from heat."

That is verbatim from the recipe I was given. So if I am typing minutes left, it should have read
hops (60)
hops (20)
hops (5)
hops (dry)

I wrote the recipe in my notes before doing the recipe, and since I wrote "40" instead of 20, that probably was the reason i flubbed the addition. I may have to agree with Minky, that maybe it should have been a 40 min addition. Screw the LHBS recipes. I will make sure to read and re-read my own recipes before making my purchase...although there are some yummy looking kits at northernbrewer.

Northern Brewer kits are where I started. Good kits. Good instructions.
But also take into account things you've read here. Don't squeeze the grains (you've already noted). Add some of the extract later - for lighter color. Extract Kits tend to get kind of dark when 'cooked' for the entire boil time. Consider All Grain and full boils...

I think you're on your way!!!

Yeah, i actually picked up a $5 6 gallon granite ware pot at Salvation Army the other day, so I'm hoping to really study DeathBrewers stovetop AG method. I also have tons of 5 gal food buckets, so I'm hoping to drill out a ghetto lauter tun as well.

SNB said:

only a 10 min steep, that feels a little short to me. I usualy do 30 min at 160 when i am using a recipe from my LHBS.

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Yep, and you shouldn't squeeze the grains, you should simply let them drain.

bigmanbt said:

So I'm pretty sure the hops did that "D" word, yes?

Click to expand...

Could someone please tell me what this means?

Take a look here for a Bell's two-hearted recipie.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f69/bells-two-hearted-ale-clone-close-they-come-91488/

Still, watery is weird. 8.5 pounds of malt is a lot of extract. I just brewed a pale ale with 5.5 pounds of DME and a pound of crystal malt and while it's certainly lighter than my stouts, it's far from watery. And even if you totally spaced it and didn't add any hops at all, it still wouldn't be watery. It would just be thick malt (basically, not beer).

FYI - for crushing your grains in the future, my LHBS won't mill less than 2lbs of grain, but they recommended using a large ziplock bag and rolling over it with a rolling pin. Seemed to work fine.... I've also heard a coffee bean grinder will do the trick. Just make sure you've got a strainer fine enough to catch the grain after it's been through it...

the "D" word referring to what happens to Hops when exposed to heat and oxygen. I just cant' remember what it is. Like Denatrification or something like that but I know thats not it. The breaking down of the hops quality.

Maybe you are thinking of denatured, which is used to describe enzymes that have been made inactive by excessive heat. I haven't heard that word used with hops, though.