Caramel taste

[tiredofbuyingbeer]

So I just tried the gravity sample of my most recent beer, a kit version of Northern Brewer's Dead Ringer IPA. It's supposed to be a clone of Bell's Two-Hearted, though I would settle for anything in the hoppy pale ale universe as long as it's tasty.

I noticed the sample has this somewhat unpleasant (to me, anyway) caramel character to it. The recipe calls for steeping 1 pound of crystal 40 for 20 minutes while you're heating 2.5 gallons of water, or until the water reaches 70 degrees. I followed the steeping instructions in How to Brew instead: 30 minutes at around 155-160 degrees. I also "sparged" by dunking the grain bag in some other water I was heating up (was lower than 150) for a minute or two. So maybe I extracted more caramel flavor from the grains than I expected?

Anyway, I don't know that it's the crystal malt. Maybe it's something else. The sample was remarkably clear, at least as far as my gravity samples have gone so far, so I don't think that it's a yeasty flavor I'm misinterpreting as caramelized or anything. I only added about a pound of LME to the full boil, and there wasn't any scorching at the bottom of the kettle after I brewed it. The sample was taken before dry hopping, so maybe that's it. It was what I take to be an appropriate final gravity for this beer: 1.0107, adjusting for the temperature of the sample, or 1.011 if we're rounding to significant digits. The first thing that came to mind when tasting it was that this must be what some people have in mind when they complain about people using too much crystal malt.

Anyway, I guess my questions are:
1. Is it possible to over-steep crystal malt? (I know it's possible to extract too many tannins from any steeped grain, but this wasn't a puckery flavor at all.)
2. Does this sort of flavor smooth over time? Should I hope for it to mellow out in the bottle?
3. Maybe I just don't like the flavor of crystal malt. Is 1 pound of C40 a lot for a 1.06 OG IPA? I would think that, if I were averse to crystal, I wouldn't like a lot of commercial IPAs, but I do.
4. What else could be causing the caramel taste?

 

[microbusbrewery]

I think it's probably from the crystal. That seems like quite a bit to me, but it's been a long time since I've done anything but all-grain. I've really cut back on the amount of crystal malts I use in my IPAs. One way to be sure, brew the same recipe again but cut back on the crystal and see what you think.

Sometimes you can get a "good" oxidation that tastes kind of like toffee and caramel rather than the wet paper/cardboard character associated with oxidation. If you're just pulling a sample, then it should be way too early for something like that to manifest itself. LME can also oxidize, but I doubt that NB has LME sitting around long enough for that to happen. So my money is on the crystal malt.