skratch
New Member
I posted this in the recipe subforum first, but didn't get any bites.
I was hoping you guys might have some insight as to why two batches of partial mash beer that I made tasted, well, bad. I've been brewing for about three years or so and except for "The Summer of No Temperature Control" I've been lucky enough to generally make good tasting beer. Bear with my terminology below, because I'm far from being a certified BJCP judge. But I will nonetheless do my best to describe the flavor of the brews after providing the recipes.
The first beer was a Simcoe Pale Ale. Simple recipe: 4lbs Extra Light DME, 3lbs 2-row Pale Ale malt, 1lb Crystal 60L, and 8 oz. Biscuit. I added 1 oz. of Simcoe hops at 60 minutes, 15 minutes, and 3 minutes and pitched WLP001. In retrospect, the full ounce of 13% AA hops for an hour may have been a bit heavy.
I tasted the beer as I was kegging and was pretty disappointed. I hoped carbonation would magically "fix" it and waited until it was ready to drink from the keg. Unfortunately, it still tasted bad! The flavor can be described as a "flat" and overwhelming bitterness with little to no complexity which drowns out any malt character. An overall unpleasant flavor, tied to the bitterness, spreads through the mouth and lingers. The aroma completely lacks any sort of "good" hop notes like citrus, pine, or floral. It in fact smells very similar to how it tastes. Like an ugly child still loved by its mother, I am able to drink it and after a few of them I get used to the taste. It just tastes wrong though. I initially chalked it up to Simcoe hops not being my thing, since I had never used them before.
After discovering that this beer tasted rather nasty, I decided to re-brew a Rye Pale Ale that had been my greatest brew to date:
3.3 lbs extra light LME, 3 lbs 2-row, 2 lbs rye malt, 1 lb extra light DME, 1 lb Crystal 20L, 8 oz. Biscuit. 1 oz. each of Centennial, Chinook, and Cascade at 60 minutes, 15 minutes, and 3 minutes respectively. I again used WLP001 yeast.
To my great dismay, this beer ended up with pretty much the exact same crummy flavor profile of the Simcoe Pale Ale! Flat bitterness (meaning lacking complexity) and aroma, and no subtlety from the malt. The confounding part was that it was an almost exact replica (an extra pound of rye and 1 oz of late Cascade missing) of a previous brew, and the first version was absolutely fantastic.
Both fermentations went off without a hitch. Nice krausen and solid activity within 24-48 hours. Both were in primary for at least 4 weeks and then kegged. Both finished at just about 1.012, which is my normal FG with the California Ale Yeast. Also, I control the temperature during fermentation to 65-70F. Furthermore, I am familiar with the banana/ester off-flavors of fermenting too hot and this is definitely not the issue.
So now onto my own troubleshooting, and what I can deduce and eliminate.
There is definitely no infection. I am always very careful about cleaning and sanitizing, and the healthy fermentation showed no signs of any sort of infection issues (I ferment in glass). The only change in sanitation was that I ran out of One Step and switched to Starsan starting with the Simcoe Pale Ale. The "common denominator" between the two brews was the base malt for the partial mash. I ended up buying a 10lbs bag of 2-row when I starting doing partial mash and it sat in my fermentation closet for a good few months with no special care given to it. I have read the description of off-flavors caused by old/stale grain over and over and to me it's not a dead ringer for what I'm tasting but I'm not completely eliminating it as a possibility. I have never tasted a beer that I knew to have grain problems, so I don't have a good baseline point of comparison. Other beers made earlier in the lifetime of the 2-row tasted fine, so it was definitely good to begin with.
The next obvious thing to consider is an issue with the hops; the schedule, the quality, or something else. The flavor profile of both beers vaguely reminds me of a waaay overhopped IPA I tried to make which turned out kind of bad. According to hopville, the BU:GU on the Simcoe PA is 1.4 which is certainly pretty high in retrospect. But I don't know if this could fully explain the harshness and lack of depth in the flavor of the beer. What casts doubt on this is the Rye PA having a very similarly bad flavor profile. The previous incarnation of this beer was excellent, and if anything this second version should have less BU. So, is it possible that the AA content of the bittering hops was so vastly different over the course of 6 months or so that I ended up with a much higher IBU beer? I did not check the package for AA% either time. Otherwise, the other possibility is that for some reason I got vastly different utilization the two times I brewed the beer but I find that highly unlikely. The last thing I can think of is that I somehow inadvertently ended up with a lot of hop material in the fermenter out of the kettle and unintentionally effectively dry hopped the beer for along time, but that's a longshot.
Both beers tasted funny out of the fermenter before kegging, and both kegs had perfectly good tasting beers in them (to the last pints) before filling them with these two new ones.
Lastly, I recently did my first 3 gallon all-grain BIAB. It was a sweet stout that's still waiting to be bottled (I'm so hesitant to do this now that I'm kegging!). I tasted it when I checked the gravity a few weeks ago and it tasted totally fine--no off flavors. This was brewed with Marris Otter (purchased new for the brew day) and only 1 oz of hops. So this leaves the possibility of either old 2-row being the issue with the other brews, or an over-hopping although this is less likely with the Rye PA.
I would really appreciate any advice or insight you all might have, as I'm hesitant to brew again until I can pinpoint the source of the problem. With my schedule and finances, it's a mega bummer to brew a beer and have it come out this bad. If anyone is local to the Pittsburgh area, I would happily share some of my sketchy ales to see if a knowledgeable third party could pick something up with their pallet that I'm not familiar with.
I was hoping you guys might have some insight as to why two batches of partial mash beer that I made tasted, well, bad. I've been brewing for about three years or so and except for "The Summer of No Temperature Control" I've been lucky enough to generally make good tasting beer. Bear with my terminology below, because I'm far from being a certified BJCP judge. But I will nonetheless do my best to describe the flavor of the brews after providing the recipes.
The first beer was a Simcoe Pale Ale. Simple recipe: 4lbs Extra Light DME, 3lbs 2-row Pale Ale malt, 1lb Crystal 60L, and 8 oz. Biscuit. I added 1 oz. of Simcoe hops at 60 minutes, 15 minutes, and 3 minutes and pitched WLP001. In retrospect, the full ounce of 13% AA hops for an hour may have been a bit heavy.
I tasted the beer as I was kegging and was pretty disappointed. I hoped carbonation would magically "fix" it and waited until it was ready to drink from the keg. Unfortunately, it still tasted bad! The flavor can be described as a "flat" and overwhelming bitterness with little to no complexity which drowns out any malt character. An overall unpleasant flavor, tied to the bitterness, spreads through the mouth and lingers. The aroma completely lacks any sort of "good" hop notes like citrus, pine, or floral. It in fact smells very similar to how it tastes. Like an ugly child still loved by its mother, I am able to drink it and after a few of them I get used to the taste. It just tastes wrong though. I initially chalked it up to Simcoe hops not being my thing, since I had never used them before.
After discovering that this beer tasted rather nasty, I decided to re-brew a Rye Pale Ale that had been my greatest brew to date:
3.3 lbs extra light LME, 3 lbs 2-row, 2 lbs rye malt, 1 lb extra light DME, 1 lb Crystal 20L, 8 oz. Biscuit. 1 oz. each of Centennial, Chinook, and Cascade at 60 minutes, 15 minutes, and 3 minutes respectively. I again used WLP001 yeast.
To my great dismay, this beer ended up with pretty much the exact same crummy flavor profile of the Simcoe Pale Ale! Flat bitterness (meaning lacking complexity) and aroma, and no subtlety from the malt. The confounding part was that it was an almost exact replica (an extra pound of rye and 1 oz of late Cascade missing) of a previous brew, and the first version was absolutely fantastic.
Both fermentations went off without a hitch. Nice krausen and solid activity within 24-48 hours. Both were in primary for at least 4 weeks and then kegged. Both finished at just about 1.012, which is my normal FG with the California Ale Yeast. Also, I control the temperature during fermentation to 65-70F. Furthermore, I am familiar with the banana/ester off-flavors of fermenting too hot and this is definitely not the issue.
So now onto my own troubleshooting, and what I can deduce and eliminate.
There is definitely no infection. I am always very careful about cleaning and sanitizing, and the healthy fermentation showed no signs of any sort of infection issues (I ferment in glass). The only change in sanitation was that I ran out of One Step and switched to Starsan starting with the Simcoe Pale Ale. The "common denominator" between the two brews was the base malt for the partial mash. I ended up buying a 10lbs bag of 2-row when I starting doing partial mash and it sat in my fermentation closet for a good few months with no special care given to it. I have read the description of off-flavors caused by old/stale grain over and over and to me it's not a dead ringer for what I'm tasting but I'm not completely eliminating it as a possibility. I have never tasted a beer that I knew to have grain problems, so I don't have a good baseline point of comparison. Other beers made earlier in the lifetime of the 2-row tasted fine, so it was definitely good to begin with.
The next obvious thing to consider is an issue with the hops; the schedule, the quality, or something else. The flavor profile of both beers vaguely reminds me of a waaay overhopped IPA I tried to make which turned out kind of bad. According to hopville, the BU:GU on the Simcoe PA is 1.4 which is certainly pretty high in retrospect. But I don't know if this could fully explain the harshness and lack of depth in the flavor of the beer. What casts doubt on this is the Rye PA having a very similarly bad flavor profile. The previous incarnation of this beer was excellent, and if anything this second version should have less BU. So, is it possible that the AA content of the bittering hops was so vastly different over the course of 6 months or so that I ended up with a much higher IBU beer? I did not check the package for AA% either time. Otherwise, the other possibility is that for some reason I got vastly different utilization the two times I brewed the beer but I find that highly unlikely. The last thing I can think of is that I somehow inadvertently ended up with a lot of hop material in the fermenter out of the kettle and unintentionally effectively dry hopped the beer for along time, but that's a longshot.
Both beers tasted funny out of the fermenter before kegging, and both kegs had perfectly good tasting beers in them (to the last pints) before filling them with these two new ones.
Lastly, I recently did my first 3 gallon all-grain BIAB. It was a sweet stout that's still waiting to be bottled (I'm so hesitant to do this now that I'm kegging!). I tasted it when I checked the gravity a few weeks ago and it tasted totally fine--no off flavors. This was brewed with Marris Otter (purchased new for the brew day) and only 1 oz of hops. So this leaves the possibility of either old 2-row being the issue with the other brews, or an over-hopping although this is less likely with the Rye PA.
I would really appreciate any advice or insight you all might have, as I'm hesitant to brew again until I can pinpoint the source of the problem. With my schedule and finances, it's a mega bummer to brew a beer and have it come out this bad. If anyone is local to the Pittsburgh area, I would happily share some of my sketchy ales to see if a knowledgeable third party could pick something up with their pallet that I'm not familiar with.
