Sweet smell, and taste

All brews we have tried so far come out with the same distinct sweet smell/taste.. Would this be the result of caramalizing the malt, or too much malt?

All recipes have mostly different ingridients but are brewed the same way and all use Muntons malt, dry or liquid.

Brew is 3 gallon pot, for 60 minutes.

Recipes:
hopville . Cousinz

any information would be appreciated.. If more info is needed pls let me know..

Thanks...

never seen that site, nice, i'll have to check it out

noob warning...

i just noticed some of your recipes' IBUs are somewhat low, so you may get sweeter tastes, even in that milk chocolate stout that had that FG of 1.020.

seasoned vets?

how long do you age it in secondary and bottle? I noticed my malty beer usually come out sweet and fruity, but as it ages the maltiness is not as pronounced and it become a nice balance beer.

I believe homebrews need time to mellow.

noob warning... yes thanks..

As for the recipe's the only ones that have been brewed on that site have been:
Not Quite Amber American Amber Ale Partial Mash
Witbier.. We hope? Witbier Partial Mash
Dunkle or Not.... Weizenbock Extract

Fermentation is usally 7 days Primary, 14 days Secondary...

Amber has been bottled for about 5 weeks.. not so sweet taste but distinct sweet smell

Dunkle has been bottle for about 3-4 weeks.. very sweet smell and taste...

Witbier has been bottled for 1.5 weeks... very sweet smell and taste...

Trying to figure out if this is just underaged, too much malt, not enough IBU's or if there is a problem with the brewing/recipie/sanitizing.. etc....

Thanks.

What's your fermentation temp? Sometimes diacetyl comes across as a sweet flavor...buttery. If you're fermenting too warm, that would easily cause the same problem across the board despite different recipes.

Fermentation has been around 66-70F..

As for following the Yeast temps on the liquid or dry yeast packs we have stayed close to the the mid range of the temps each time...

I'm a little too druck right now to go into my usualy long explanations of things..but I have found this chart invaluable to recipe creation...It is an IBU/GU chart. Ibus in relation to the OG of a beer...



When you start futzing with the grain bill it helps to refer to this chart to see what IBU's you want to shoot for...you can, as you see, figure the range from very malty to very hoppy...I usually shoot for evenly balanced for most my brews...except of course IPA which obviously are very hoppy, and vienna lagers or other very malty beers.


Hope this helps....It's pretty straight forward.

Our first guess was the malt to hop ratio, but the amber ale was a hopped up extract and 1 oz hops with 13HBU, and as this one is the best balance on taste, it still has the same distinct sweet smell that is hard to pinpoint what it is...

Cousinz said:

Fermentation has been around 66-70F..

As for following the Yeast temps on the liquid or dry yeast packs we have stayed close to the the mid range of the temps each time...

Click to expand...

The range at which the yeast will function is not necessarily optimal...fermentation can generate an extra 5-8 degrees of temperature above ambient...so if you were at 68, the actual temp could have been as high as 76. I'm going to hazard that you're fermenting too warm. Try different methods suggested in these forums to cool your ferment to 62-65 and see if that has an impact.

The temp range noted above (66-70) was from the temp on the side of the glass carboy, was not actually the ambient tempature..

Ambient temp was closer to 62-64 degrees.

So Malt vs Hops, low IBU's? or is Fermentation temps?

What steps would you take to try to correct this first?
- late malt addition, or more hops to increase IBU's?
- lower fermentation temps? Stay on the low end of the yeast recommendation?

Thanks