Salty taste

[chirodoccm]

I brewed a hef about 3
Weeks ago. For some reason ( swmbo wanted to clean kitchen and i was told to hurry) I decided to go with the alternate brewing instructions on the kit from my LHBS which were:

No specialty grains
Boil
Add bittering hops 10 min
Add flavoring hops 5 min later
Add extract
Remove, cool, pitch


It's fermented at ~63F for 3.5 weeks hydro hasnt moved the last week so figured it was done and was going to keg. Took a sample and well yuck. No hefe flavor. Just salty nastiness. Not really a salt off flavor, more like brown ocean water flavor.


Thoughts?

I know it's still green and all but it has no redeemable flavor ATM.

 

[unionrdr]

What exactly did you put in the kettle?

 

[chirodoccm]

What exactly did you put in the kettle?

Well. Looking back at my notes


3.5 gallons water
1oz bittering
1oz aroma ( didn't note actual hop)
6lbs wheat extract

Pretty sure I didn't mess anything up. Hadn't been drinking or anything.

Maybe old extract kit or something. I have found I am not very happy with my LHBS. The first 4 beers I did were from ther and my first batch from midwest and from AHA were 100x's better.

 

[juslod]

How long was the boil, only 10 minutes?

 

[chirodoccm]

How long was the boil, only 10 minutes?

Correct

 

[ArcaneXor]

Only thing I can think of is cleaner residue, which would add a chemical/salty flavor to the beer and accelerate yeast autolysis (giving you a meaty, brothy flavor). What cleaner and sanitizer did you use, and did you rinse either of them?

 

[unionrdr]

Probably just green beer. Beer is weird that way. Sometimes you get an idea of what the final product will be. Other times,you won't get that till it ages for whatever amount of time it needs to mellow out. I've seen that happen to batches of wheat beer on here. Nasty toilet water till 4-5 weeks later. Then bam! Good beer.

 

[Yooper]

How long was the boil, only 10 minutes?

Correct

With only 10 minutes for the boil, you didn't extract the oils from the hops. Hops oils only isomerize while boiling, and it takes quite a long time for it to happen- usually 45-60 minutes is needed to extract the bittering potential from the hops.

The flavor hops should give some hop flavor, but without bitterness, it's not really going to be beer. Wort is sweet, and it's the bitterness from the hops that provide the counterbalance to it to make it taste like beer.

If it tastes like sweet-ish pond water, that's kinda what you made, I'm sorry to say.

 

[chirodoccm]

Only thing I can think of is cleaner residue, which would add a chemical/salty flavor to the beer and accelerate yeast autolysis (giving you a meaty, brothy flavor). What cleaner and sanitizer did you use, and did you rinse either of them?

1 step and starsan. Didnt rinse either.
I always use the in slightly lower concentrations then the say and just soak for a bit.

Might be that but I can't think of anything I did different with this batch then previously. I'm pretty confident in my cleanliness procedures.

 

[ArcaneXor]

Probably just green beer. Beer is weird that way. Sometimes you get an idea of what the final product will be. Other times,you won't get that till it ages for whatever amount of time it needs to mellow out. I've seen that happen to batches of wheat beer on here. Nasty toilet water till 4-5 weeks later. Then bam! Good beer.

I generally agree with you for high gravity beers and ones with process flaws, but the flavors that the OP describes are very unusual for a Hefeweizen. You should be able to drink a Hefe within a week of brewing it; two weeks at the very most.
Salty is a flavor I've only come across a few times - in a Gose, in a beer where someone miscalculated his salt additions by an order of magnitude, and in a beer where the brewer didn't rinse the cleaner.

With only 10 minutes for the boil, you didn't extract the oils from the hops. Hops oils only isomerize while boiling, and it takes quite a long time for it to happen- usually 45-60 minutes is needed to extract the bittering potential from the hops.

Assuming 12 Plato and 4.5% AA Tettnanger additions he should have around 7 Rager IBUs. The BJCP target for the style is 8-15. Certainly could make the beer taste a little off-balance, especially if the AA on the hops was even lower.

 

[ArcaneXor]

1 step and starsan. Didnt rinse either.
I always use the in slightly lower concentrations then the say and just soak for a bit.

I can't find the MSDS for One-Step, but I would definitely recommend rinsing it before adding the StarSan in the future. Even if both are considered no-rinse, they are not intended to come into contact with each other. I once made the mistake of not rinsing the cleaner (oxiclean) from my carboy, and was greeted with a nasty, sulfuric swamp water smell when I added the StarSan. Thankfully, I rinsed everything out and started over.

Not sure if this is your problem, especially since you had luck using this procedure in the past, but I would still change this for future batches, i.e. clean, rinse, sanitize (don't rinse the sanitizer), fill. It'll make for better beer.

 

[chirodoccm]

I can't find the MSDS for One-Step, but I would definitely recommend rinsing it before adding the StarSan in the future. Even if both are considered no-rinse, they are not intended to come into contact with each other. I once made the mistake of not rinsing the cleaner (oxiclean) from my carboy, and was greeted with a nasty, sulfuric swamp water smell when I added the StarSan. Thankfully, I rinsed everything out and started over.

Not sure if this is your problem, especially since you had luck using this procedure in the past, but I would still change this for future batches, i.e. clean, rinse, sanitize (don't rinse the sanitizer), fill. It'll make for better beer.

Will make that change. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[shutupjojo]

Does your water system use a water softener?

 

[Yooper]

I generally agree with you for high gravity beers and ones with process flaws, but the flavors that the OP describes are very unusual for a Hefeweizen. You should be able to drink a Hefe within a week of brewing it; two weeks at the very most.
Salty is a flavor I've only come across a few times - in a Gose, in a beer where someone miscalculated his salt additions by an order of magnitude, and in a beer where the brewer didn't rinse the cleaner.



Assuming 12 Plato and 4.5% AA Tettnanger additions he should have around 7 Rager IBUs. The BJCP target for the style is 8-15. Certainly could make the beer taste a little off-balance, especially if the AA on the hops was even lower.

Weird. Running it through Beersmith I get 4 IBUs (Tinseth) with a 10 minute boil.

 

[ArcaneXor]

Weird. Running it through Beersmith I get 4 IBUs (Tinseth) with a 10 minute boil.

Probably the different formulas - for what they are worth (or not). None of the formulas can handle isomeration at sub-boiling temperatures; i.e. continued production of bitterness between flameout and chilling. For example, a 10-minute steep at 90 degrees C would still produce an isomeration yield of 2.5%, whereas the formulas assume a yield of 0 at those conditions.

For comparison: 10-minute boil: 4.4%, 60-minute boil 27.9%, 90-minute boil: 36% under laboratory conditions (values from Jaskula et al., 2008. A Kinetic Study on the Isomerization of Hop alpha-Acids. J. Agric. Food Chem. 2008, 56, 6408–6415.)