Do I Win?

[Lightning Jeff]

... The Stupidest Mistake Award, that is.

Hi folks, first post but as so many others have said, what a great forum - so much useful info and you guys seem to be pretty nice to newbies, so here goes...

I got my gear from a local homebrew shop (never knew there was such a thing), and after reading much of Papazian's "Complete Joy" (3rd Ed.), I thought I was ready to get started. If I'd taken the time to read Palmer (which was included with my kit), I'd have avoided this disaster.

My intent was to create an extra-hoppy IPA, using a recipe I found in Papazian's book. (Roughly, 7.5# light LME; 1# crystal malt; .5# biscuit malt; 4 oz chinook pellets distributed for bittering, flavor and aroma.) So, I gathered my ingredients, and did as CP said - put about 2.5 gallons of cold water in the carboy, and boiled 2.5 gallons. Once boiling, I dumped my LME, cracked grains and bittering hops right in. Right, didn't use a grain bag to steep and remove the grains, left 'em right in the wort for the whole boil. Ditto the hops - no bag, just dumped 'em in.

When it came time to transfer the wort to the carboy, well, wow. What a mess. Huge globs of gunk in the wort (hot break clinging to the grains, I guess). I strained it into the fermenter, and did manage to get much of the gunk out, but there was so much that it held much of the liquid, and I ended up with maybe 3.5 gallons of wort in the fermentor (including the plain water I'd added at the start), on top of a pretty thick layer of what must have been suspended fine grain particles that quickly settled to the bottom of the carboy. OG: 1.040 (certainly due to screwing up with grain and straining much of the sugar out with the gunk).

In addition, it took so long to strain the wort that by the time I got it mixed in with the water already in the carboy, the temp was well below 75 - more like 62. Pitched my yeast (White Labs liquid), and watched it do nothing for the next 24 hours.

The yeast did finally take off when I warmed up the carboy, and did ferment actively for several days. Over the course of the next week I saw everything I think I should have seen (active fermentation, decent krausen, then slowing down and krausen setting to the bottom). The grain layer was eventually covered with the yeasty stuff that I guess would be more typical trub and yeast cake.

So after a week I racked to a secondary carboy. It's now fairly clean, but when I used the thief to grab a taste, well... not so good. Also, gravity when I racked was 1.013. So, it sounds like what was there fermented pretty well after all, but ... do the math ... 3.2% beer??? Not exactly what I was shooting for!

So what are my prospects? Will a couple of weeks in the secondary (with way too much headspace), and some time in the bottles fix 'er up into something I can drink?

(I did brew up another batch of what is supposed to be a clone of Stone's Arrogant Bastard and that seemed to go very well, so I think I've corrected my mistakes.)

Thanks again for all the useful info here guys,

Jeff

 

[david_42]

I'd boil three pounds of extract in a gallon of water and add it to the secondary. Plan on a second racking in a week or so. This would boost the ABV a couple percent and balance the bitterness a bit. You probably also have a lot of tannins, polyclar is a fining that will remove tannin and also clear up the sludge.

Thanks for posting, I needed a good laugh. We've all had bad brewing experiences.

 

[Darth Konvel]

First off, welcome aboard!

Second, I'm afraid we're out of prizes for the above reward

Looking over things real quick, I'd say you have a higher abv then 3.2%. 1.013 looks right around where it should have ended up. Guesstimate of 5% maybe? If anything it will probably be kind of harsh due to boiling the grains. I'd let it age for a while and try it again.

 

[QuietKeith]

Aging for a few extra weeks should help out greatly. My first brew was an IPA, and I was probably in over my head - two kinds of malt, specialty grains, and three kinds of hops. By sheer impatience I only topped the primary to 4 gallons instead of 5 as well. The result tasted more or less like an IPA but was very astringent and very bitter. Two weeks after bottling, I tried a sample. The astringency was starting to fade, but still a very bitter beer. Sometime between two and four weeks, a miracle happened. The beer became much more balanced and the astringency dissapeared (settled out, maybe?). That batch is now six weeks in the bottle, and I'm just getting into the second case - every week that goes by results in a better beer, although the improvement isn't quite a great as that period between weeks 2 and 4.