what to do with really bland beer

Awesome forum,

Our homebrew club did a 15-gallon batch of amber (I was not the brewmaster) and the reaction has been pretty negative. "There is nothing there." "It tastes like, well, not much." and "I would water the grass with this."

I agree, I could not get through one of ten bottles that I brought to a recent picnic. It is a nice amber color, but has so little flavor. Since I was not the brewer I do not have the recipe or brewing notes in front of me. I suspect, given my somewhat noob standing, that the conversion was really low as it tastes like a thin, watered down amber.

We have 10 gallons in secondary remaining; any suggestions on how to amp up the flavor? I know blending is an option, but we have some really good brews on tap and on the way, I would hate to dilute them.

Dry hopping? Can I introduce boiled LME to kickstart the fermentation and amp up the malt flavor? How about aging on oak, or as I was thinking, racking on some hops and American Honey liquor.

It would be a shame to waste this brew, but we have five or six in the pipeline and only three corneys.

Help!

Steep some specialty grains (crystal 60, biscuit malt, caramunich, etc) in a minimal amount of water, blend it in. Rack some beer out of the fermentor to make space if you need to. Dry hop the bastard with a couple of ounces of good cirtusy hops per 5 gallons. That could bring some flavor to the party!

i've done the "make a dry-malt syrup and add it in" with good results, but it was at the tail-end of the fermentation instead of after completion. I still can't imagine running into problems either way, but maybe someone who's actually done it can chime in. i'd definitely suggest tracking down the recipe first and plugging it into beersmith so you don't over/under do any new malt additions.

the specialty grain steep and dry hopping sounds like a good call to me as well.

Blend it with other beers...

There's a great podcast on it from BasicBrewing radio, with one of our own members (Oldsock.)

December 4, 2008 - Beer Blending Experiment
Michael Tonsmeire, The Mad Fermentationist, leads James, Steve, and Andy through an exercise of blending beers together to create better ones.
http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrewing/bbr12-04-08blending.mp3

Click to expand...

There was also a thread on it last week.

What to do with a really bland beer? Why, dominate the market, of course!

Pilgarlic said:

What to do with a really bland beer? Why, dominate the market, of course!

Click to expand...

Ha. I was going to say package and market to WalMart.

Try adding some lime juice to a glass. If it helps, make a zest of a couple of limes, and soak in vodka for a week. Then, filter the extract through coffee filter into the bottling bucket with the rest of the Amber.

Worth a try, better than pouring it out.

I had a very similar amber ale recently. My OG was low, I mashed too low and WLP001 just sucked the life right out of it. I got through my five gallons, but looking back I wonder if adding some fruit extract like apricot or something would be good to make it a nice little summer beer or something?

Fruit, Watermellon

Add in honey, lemon and eucalyptus and keep it for when you have a bad cough?

permo said:

I had a very similar amber ale recently. My OG was low, I mashed too low and WLP001 just sucked the life right out of it. I got through my five gallons, but looking back I wonder if adding some fruit extract like apricot or something would be good to make it a nice little summer beer or something?

Click to expand...

I had the same problem too with a way way way way pale ale, mashed too low got a flavorless beer.
Unfortunately its kegged so I can't just set bottles aside. I'll drink it until my IPA or Heff finishes fermenting and then the way too pale ale is going to feed the fishes... Life is too short for me to drink beer I'm not happy with.

knotquiteawake said:

I had the same problem too with a way way way way pale ale, mashed too low got a flavorless beer.
Unfortunately its kegged so I can't just set bottles aside. I'll drink it until my IPA or Heff finishes fermenting and then the way too pale ale is going to feed the fishes... Life is too short for me to drink beer I'm not happy with.

Click to expand...

Ah, but you can fix it in the keg. Add some flavor extract. Try a few drops in a glass, first. Then, do the math and add the right amount to the keg.

I have "corrected" several experimental kegs that turned out bad. Sometimes it works, sometimes you still have to pour it out.

Make an eisbier from it?

I know this is a painful answer. If the beer is bad, you only have one option.

(Brace yourself)
You have to dump it on the ground.

No. Biting the bullet and drinking the bad beer is not an option to entertain....life is too short. Trying to "fix" it is worse than just drinking it as is. Give your friends a sample; you can hear them now, "I tried a homebrew once; once." That is not helping the hobby.

There is a reality that seems very difficult to accept. Sometimes your beer sucks, and you have to throw it away. Things go wrong. It is okay. You can try to add fruit (and it will be a crappy beer with fruit), you can try to oak (and it will be a crappy beer with oak), add more LME (and it is a stonger, crappy beer)...you get the point. I even think you are wasting your time blending. Lets say you brew a new batch, and it is great. You are seriously going to cut it with crap? Are you that concerned with quantity over quality? Cut your losses, dump the beer. There will be other batches, and they will be better. I am not a big DFH guy, but the episode where Sam dumped the 120 IPA was awesome. He was willing to flush serious $ down the drain; you've got to be willing to dump 15 gallons.

The OP is missing the only positive of the situation. If I recall, this was a club brew, and something went awry. Awesome. You have a club's worth of people that can review the process and identify every hole; never making the same mistakes again. Start with the recipe. Were you destined for failure? How did the mash go? Were the numbers hit? Let's assume you made it fine into the carboys, was fermentation controlled? I promise the answers are there.

When I joined this board, I did not post much. Instead, I learned a lot by reading. I read books, posts, listened to podcasts; anything I could find. The main thing I took away is that with all the "Why does my beer suck?" questions, there is always an answer (usually more than one), and more often than not, it is obvious. Bad beer doesn't just happen; it is made.

So make that your next club meeting.....
"Why does our beer suck". Spend your energy figuring out what went wrong with the last beer. Find ways to ensure it doesn't happen on your next batch.

If the OP is still interested in improving the club, I strongly advise steering this thread away from how to fix the beer, and toward how to fix the process.

Good Luck,

Joe

Make some malt vinegar and about 1000 pounds of fish and chips

Beer batter, beer gravy, beer braised beef/pork/chicken etc. I had some red cabbage braised in Stone old guardian barley wine once and it was really good.

Could you not make some 'hop tea' and add that? I don't really know about that but maybe someone on here does.

The simplest answer, I think, is to dry-hop the **** out of it. Get some nice aromatics working for you. That "bland" beer may be a little more palatable in a few months when it starts getting really warm out, I sure wouldn't dump it at this point.

Or if you want to make a bigger project out of it, make up an aggressively-hopped IPA and blend.

Before I did anything else, though... I'd get good amount of a nice, fresh domestic hop and try just dryhopping for a few weeks. You could still blend it later on, the extra hop aroma's going to be something you probably shoot for anyway.

To all who have responded, very cool stuff!

Very good read in this thread so far, thank you all for taking the time to lay this all out. there are some very good suggestions here, but I want to focus on Joe's post, as there is a huge back story to this that needs to be explained.

I agree in principle with your opening line about dumping the brew; as I stated before (perhaps in another thread), I have done this twice with my own beer in the past year, and yes, each time was an interesting if not somewhat painful learning experience. If the club was ruled as dictatorship, and I was the Kaddaffi in headgear, I would simply decree it be banished from the basement-dom to make way for better brews, and yes, go back and analyze the process to find out what went wrong.

The conundrum, however, is that some members of the club do not see the problem with it. Some of the members are not brewers themselves, only help out on brew days to earn credits to consumption. These guys think Heineken is a good beer; the reaction to the Amber in this thread has only been negative by two of us, the other eight are indifferent, with comments like "it is not THAT bad." They are in the club to be able to obtain "drinkable" beer at 50 cents a pull. When I joined, with a bit of Sam Caligione attitude on pushing the norm out a bit, I sent out a poll to the members, asking what they wanted out of the club. The choices:

1. To make really inexpensive beer
2. To create exceptional examples of beers we can buy in the store
3. To create as much variety as possible
4. To create beers we cannot find locally or are too expensive to buy
5. To create extreme beers, experiment with ingredients, and brew beers that are not available for purchase

Me, #2, #4, and #5 are most important. The result of the poll, however, showed that the majority favored #1 first, with #4 a distant second. So what I am faced with is a club who's majority do not know much about beer outside of BMC and are in it to save money.

So, for most of those brew days, the driving factor is cost, and they grab very basic recipes and use the most inexpensive ingredients and roll in with "standard" 60 min mashes at 152 degrees and then pitch way too small starters for 15 gallon batches (usually one vial of yeast in a 3-liter starter [no stir plate] done up 24 hours in advance and split among three 6-gallon carboys) and have no temperature control during fermentation.

I have been working on the gradual education and easing into the world of "craft" beer by bringing in my own homebrew for them to sample on brewing days, as well as pushing the recipe and process on my brewmaster days (this is a hydrometer. . . .) but the bulk of the group still wants cheap beer fast.

This is what was really behind my original post. Since I do not think the group would agree to dump the beer, I thought if I could make it better it might move out faster and thus free up kegerator room for much better brews.

All of that said, I will take your advice and have a come-to-jebus meeting with the others, explain my concerns with the Amber, provide the feedback I got from my peer group, and offer my time in analyzing the recipe and process so we do not make a "boring" beer again. At best, we can improve the club, at worst, they will kick me out and I will find another stump to preach.

Weeb,

I cried a bit when I read you reply.

I am afraid you are at a crossroads. Appease your swill loving friends, or learn how to make great beer.

I appreciate that different clubs form for different reasons. I am not part of a club, but I just kind of assumed that they were all typically "good beer forward", not "cheap beer forward". My friend and I try to get together every month, each brew a batch of all-grain, share some ideas, and sample each other's recent beers. Clearly, we get a lot out of our two person "meeting". He has taught me a ton.

I guess some clubs are more into drinking than the science. Nothing wrong with that; but be aware, unless your club commits some thought to improving practices, it will be asking "how do we fix this beer" for a LONG time.

Even if you didn't want to become a brew-psycho club, pool your funds and at least get some respectable temp control and enough yeast to ferment out the beer. If I can do it (and I am generally poor), I am sure a club's worth of people can afford it. Ignore all the little process nuances, but give yourself a decent shot at making something drinkable. You are still taking the time to brew, even if you are trying to do it bare bones/ cheap as possible.

From a value stand point, your time alone is worth more than "it's not THAT bad".

That said, you may be better off branching out a little.....

..... or just oak it.

Joe


EDIT - Heineken is good beer. Poured from a can, or served properly on draft, it is actually really good. But I've got a felling your buddies are reaching for the green bottles.

Wow, I didn't think there were *any* beer-heathens in Denver.

Honestly, that sounds like a real tough crowd to convert over to your way of thinking. It just sounds like your interests are completely antithetical to those of your brewmates, which makes me wonder.... there have got to be at least a couple other brewclubs in Denver, right?

Dry hop!