Residual Sweet Taste?

Hello,

Seems like the first thing people say when they try one of my brews is that, "it tastes sweet." I was wondering if anyone had any insight on this. They are kind of your run of the mill ales.

A couple of thoughts I had:

My FG is usually a couple points over expected, ie ends up at 1.12 instead of 1.10.
Priming with corn sugar instead of DME.
This is a characteristic on brewing with extract.

Any input would be appreciated!
-Josh

You can avoid this, but brewing with extract, it's a lot harder to nail down your SG. Different brands of extract will finish drier or sweeter depending on how they mashed their grain to produce the extract. Plenty of people prime with sugar, not DME, no problem there. (Sugar is actually more fermentable than DME)

I likely has more to do with your fermentation practices though. Not pitching the proper amount of yeast, too warm or too cold fermentation temps, or swings in fermentation temps can all make the yeast stop early, leaving a little extra sweetness in the beer.

I had that with all of my mr beer batches starting off. since though i've gone with lower mash temps on my partial grain batches and longer primaries (no secondary) and have luck with drier beers lately

Just the first thing that popped into my head when I read you post. Homebrewed beer is generally a little bit sweeter from residual sugar compared to BMC products. So be careful that you aren't taking hardcore BMC drinkers comments as advice. I have no idea if this is the case but popped in my head.

What kind of yeast are you using, liquid or dry? I always have used liquid and when I started doing a healthy starter I started hitting my FG on the nose. If you use dry you could pitch two packets I believe.

If you continue to find this to be the case with your technique/ingredients (boxed kits, etc.) I would recommend adding 10% more bittering hops to your recipe.

Thanks for advice guys. I have used both White Labs yeast as well as Safale dry yeast. I only used one packet with the Safale and I didn't use a starter with the White Labs. I am wondering if this is my problem!

Scut_Monkey said:

Just the first thing that popped into my head when I read you post. Homebrewed beer is generally a little bit sweeter from residual sugar compared to BMC products. So be careful that you aren't taking hardcore BMC drinkers comments as advice. I have no idea if this is the case but popped in my head.

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I don't think that's the cause at all- I've made some very dry beers at times.

I do think that extract has a residual sweet taste to it, though.

I'd suggest using a bit more bittering hops, as HB99 suggested, and use a more attenuative yeast if you're making the same recipe/kit.

For new recipes, I'd suggest using plain light or extra light DME and not do recipes that call for amber malt or dark malt. They often have crystal malt already in them, and then you add more if you mash or steep some grain. I'd get all of my color/flavor/sweetness from specialty grains and not from the malt.

What kind of recipes are you making? Some beers (like American Amber) just have more residual sweetness than some others (like cream ale). If you're used to drinking light lagers, even a pale ale can seem a bit thick and syrupy.

Using LME extract - I made several different beers, with different steeped grains and found a similar off-sweetness on all the light beers. I have switched to all grain now as my extract is the suspected cause. My heavily hopped extract beers are fine.

Also on my non-dry hopped extract beers - they don't even smell good when I open the bottle and check that first whiff. Extract beers need dry-hopping to cover up that smell.

My first all grain beer is still in the carboy, and it is still not done, but it sure smells different that extract.

Hopin-Josh said:

Thanks for advice guys. I have used both White Labs yeast as well as Safale dry yeast. I only used one packet with the Safale and I didn't use a starter with the White Labs. I am wondering if this is my problem!

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I would say then that's probably the problem. Use this site to see how much yeast you need for each beer, it's really simple to do and helps you turn good beer into great beer.

Since you can't control your mash, my advice would be to up the hops a little, make big starters/pitch on cakes to try and get better attenuation, just live with it, try extract from different companies until you find one that has a fermentables profile that you like, or go to grain. This is something that can be controlled by both mash temperature and mash time in all-grain, but it's hard to control in extract batches.

Thanks for all the help. The recipes have varied from something along the alongs of a Boston ale, a hoppier version of a Two Hearted and hefeweizen. Next batch I am going to do a nice starter. If that doesn't help I am going AG. : )