First Batch - weak and bitter. Recipes?

[dazsnow]

Hi all,

Just made my first all-grain batch the other night and just had a few questions before I move onto the next. Based on the OG value (1.020) and a little sip I had before putting it in the fermenter, I'm expecting a fairly weak and bitter beer. Can anyone point out what I may have done wrong or what I could do better next time?

I tried to follow this recipe: http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter18-2.html, replacing the Nugget with Chinook. I am fairly limited as to what I can make as I live in a country with an extremely homebrew community - all I can get are standard 2-row malts, biscuit, chocolate, black, wheat, and canadian pale ale malt.Only chinook and willamnette hops, and standard brewers yeast. I found it really hard to find any recipes with just these ingredients and don't know what/how I can substitute.

Anyway I made an 8L batch but after mashing the wort didn't taste sweet at all! I then sparged it over the course of a couple of hours with the same amount of water, hoping it would draw out some sugar, but I fear it only served to dilute the wort as it still wasn't sweet and really didn't have much flavour. Tried it again after the boil and of course it was extremely hoppy/bitter. I added some honey during the boil to try and give the yeast something to feed on. It's now bubbling away ok so I'm confident I'm at least going to end up with beer in a few weeks.

My questions are:

1) where can I find basic recipes?
2) where can I find out suitable substitutes for ingredients?
3) why wasn't my wort sweet? Did I not use enough grain (I tried to work it out based on the recipe, converting the american units to english) or is my grain no good? (can't get extract here) Maybe I didn't grind it finely enough?
4) Assuming it had been sweeter, am I right in thinking that the gravity would have been higher so it wouldn't have taken on so much bitterness from the hops?

Thanks

 

[wfowlks]

So the recipe is not all grain. The first grain is pale dry malt extract (DME)

If you only used 6lbs of pale malt instead of the extract that would be the reason for the low OG

As for the hoppiness, a brown ale has a distinct hop taste.

For recipes, I suggest if you don't Google it or search the forums in the recipe section I use www.bertusbrewery.com there are some great recipes and he does good walk throughs. A simple recipe would be his power outage blonde

As for suitable substitutes Google: dme substitute. But I use beer Smith a home brewing software, and it will suggest substitutes and convert between English and metric units as well as extract and all grain

 

[dazsnow]

I followed the all-grain option at the bottom of the recipe, adjusted for 8L instead of 5 gallons:

All-Grain

7.5 lbs. of 2 Row Base Malt
1 lb. of Crystal 60
1/4 lb. of Chocolate malt

So I used 1.44kg 2-row, 192g crystal, 48g chocolate, then 9g of chinook at 60 minutes, 12g at 30 mins, and 12g at 15 minutes (along with about 150g honey). Started off with 8L of water for the mash, and used another 8L for sparging.

 

[wfowlks]

The final volume should have been more than 8L then, next time you can always boil the wort longer before adding the hops and starting the official boil to remove some of the excess water. That will increase your OG

 

[Bazaar]

Using only what you can get, I've modified one of my brown recipes that uses Chinook/Willamette. You could mash high in order to acheive more resudial sweetness, since it seems your options are non-existant in terms of crystal malts.

Efficiency 70.0%
Batch size 5 gal
Boil time 60 min

92% 2-row, 5% Victory, 3% chocolate malt--enough to bring it to around 1.060 OG. You could even easily invert some sugar and add that to give it an interesting flavor (this is something that you can use as a grain substitute). Then just add the Chinook and Willamette in any order you'd prefer. Here's an example:

Hops
Name Amount Time Use Form AA
Chinook United States 0.25 oz 60 min Boil Pellet 13.0%
Chinook United States 0.25 oz 20 min Boil Pellet 13.0%
Willamette United States 0.5 oz 20 min Boil Pellet 4.0%
Chinook United States 0.25 oz 10 min Boil Pellet 13.0%
Willamette United States 0.25 oz 10 min Boil Pellet 4.0%
Chinook United States 0.25 oz 5 min Boil Pellet 13.0%
Willamette United States 0.25 oz 1 min Boil Pellet 4.0%
Willamette United States 1 oz 7 days Dry Hop Pellet 4.8%
Chinook United States 0.5 oz 7 days Dry Hop Pellet 13.0%

Yeasts
Name Lab Attenuation Temp
Fermentis US-05 – 78.0% — – —

 

[dazsnow]

ok thanks. I was just a bit disappointed with the lack of flavour/sweetness from the wort after mashing. When I've helped friends brew before the wort was always really tasty.

 

[dazsnow]

Cheers. When you say mash high, what kind of temperature do you mean? I thought it always had to be around 67 degrees.

Also what are the quantities in your recipe? Are the amounts of grain/hops always a fixed ratio to the amount of water you start with, no matter what ingredients you're using?

 

[wfowlks]

What did you use to grind the grain? And how did it look? Here is a guide to use in regards to the grain crush. Grain stored in a cool dry place should last for a while so I don't think the grain was bad but it might have been the crush.

Also how well did you hold your mash temperature?

 

[Bazaar]

It usually isn't just 5 gallons, then 5 gallons again. Use a brewer's calculator for mash/sparge calculations. Something like this:

http://www.brew365.com/mash_sparge_water_calculator.php

 

[dazsnow]

I used a grain mill like this http://www.instructables.com/files/deriv/F5C/K68A/H21CGNDR/F5CK68AH21CGNDR.LARGE.jpg

Ground it down to large crumb consistency, I think it was about right based on what my friends had done before and a google image search. What would be the impact of grinding too small / too large? I guess too large and it won't release as much flavour, right? what about too small?

I maintained the temperature pretty meticulously. I'm pretty sure it never got to more than a degree away from 67.

 

[wfowlks]

To small is a higher efficiency, but you risk a stuck mash. But you can add rice hulls if your worried about that. You want a finer crush because it increases the surface area of the malt in the mash, giving you better efficiency and more taste

 

[dazsnow]

great, thanks. Next time I'll try grinding smaller and controlling the amount of water.