boarderx3120
Active Member
- Joined
- May 27, 2016
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Did lots of research for many months before pulling the trigger and buying everything I need to brew (extract to start because I'm broke). Got a big pot for full wort boils, fastferment to avoid racking and the possibility of oxidation, and a corny keg and c02 setup.
Lets just say, brew day was...less than graceful. A few hiccups and a few too many Two Hearteds, but I felt fairly good about the way it went. I used a MoreBeer kit (Citrus Bomb) which has excellent reviews. My type of beer.
Sanitation was my number one concern and I felt pretty good about maintaining sanitation. Got my wort in the fermentor @ just under 70 degrees, pitched my yeast (wyeast 1056), hung that bad boy on the wall in a closet which was 67 degrees. Fermentation started within 8 hours and went pretty good for about 4 days. After 4 days, the bubbler was giving me about a bubble a minute. Recipe called for a 10 day primary and 10 days secondary, but @ day 10 the valve on the fermentor was clogged (VERY unhappy about that, already considering trading it for a good 'ol fashioned carboy), so it sat in primary for closer to 14 or 15 days before I grew enough balls to open it up and shove a sanitized spoon through it. Gave it another 10 days in primary and racked it to my sanitized keg. I did notice that it has some "foamy" floaties on the surface (krausen?).
Now 5 days @ 10psi of c02, I pour a little snifter and immediately, dirty socks on the nose. Give it a taste and bam, very boozy. Not necessarily in a good way. More boozy than my resulting 7.8ABV would suggest. Vodka boozy. Its followed by a bit of mustiness and alot of bitterness on the tongue.. Very little (if any) hop aroma or flavor at all, despite the copious late additions in the boil and 2oz dry hopped. Also, appearance is cloudy, but I attribute that to adding my whirlfloc too late (2 minutes before flameout - I forgot about it) and not using biofine, which the recipe recommends. I am thinking, failed first attempt...
My thoughts are...maybe I oxidized the beer when I inadvertently shook the fermentor while banging on the valve (2 or 3 times). It probably didn't help that I opened it when I got in there with a spoon. Then I splashed the beer a bit while racking to the keg (my hose was too short to reach the bottom of the corny).
Or, with the valve being clogged and my avoidance of opening the lid, I let it sit on the trub too long. I hear that can cause mustiness. There was a lot of trub (2.5 collection balls worth).
Or maybe the kit was old. There were no dates that I could find printed anywhere on the packaging. Probably unlikely though.
Or maybe my expectations are too high too early on and I'm being too impatient. Maybe I need to let it rest in the keg for another week? Maybe what I am tasting is "green" beer. I don't know what that tastes like.
I read the "off flavors" document that MoreBeer has on their website and I cant really narrow it down to just one of the examples they provide.
Anyone have tips or similar experience? I really wanted to be good at this...
Lets just say, brew day was...less than graceful. A few hiccups and a few too many Two Hearteds, but I felt fairly good about the way it went. I used a MoreBeer kit (Citrus Bomb) which has excellent reviews. My type of beer.
Sanitation was my number one concern and I felt pretty good about maintaining sanitation. Got my wort in the fermentor @ just under 70 degrees, pitched my yeast (wyeast 1056), hung that bad boy on the wall in a closet which was 67 degrees. Fermentation started within 8 hours and went pretty good for about 4 days. After 4 days, the bubbler was giving me about a bubble a minute. Recipe called for a 10 day primary and 10 days secondary, but @ day 10 the valve on the fermentor was clogged (VERY unhappy about that, already considering trading it for a good 'ol fashioned carboy), so it sat in primary for closer to 14 or 15 days before I grew enough balls to open it up and shove a sanitized spoon through it. Gave it another 10 days in primary and racked it to my sanitized keg. I did notice that it has some "foamy" floaties on the surface (krausen?).
Now 5 days @ 10psi of c02, I pour a little snifter and immediately, dirty socks on the nose. Give it a taste and bam, very boozy. Not necessarily in a good way. More boozy than my resulting 7.8ABV would suggest. Vodka boozy. Its followed by a bit of mustiness and alot of bitterness on the tongue.. Very little (if any) hop aroma or flavor at all, despite the copious late additions in the boil and 2oz dry hopped. Also, appearance is cloudy, but I attribute that to adding my whirlfloc too late (2 minutes before flameout - I forgot about it) and not using biofine, which the recipe recommends. I am thinking, failed first attempt...
My thoughts are...maybe I oxidized the beer when I inadvertently shook the fermentor while banging on the valve (2 or 3 times). It probably didn't help that I opened it when I got in there with a spoon. Then I splashed the beer a bit while racking to the keg (my hose was too short to reach the bottom of the corny).
Or, with the valve being clogged and my avoidance of opening the lid, I let it sit on the trub too long. I hear that can cause mustiness. There was a lot of trub (2.5 collection balls worth).
Or maybe the kit was old. There were no dates that I could find printed anywhere on the packaging. Probably unlikely though.
Or maybe my expectations are too high too early on and I'm being too impatient. Maybe I need to let it rest in the keg for another week? Maybe what I am tasting is "green" beer. I don't know what that tastes like.
I read the "off flavors" document that MoreBeer has on their website and I cant really narrow it down to just one of the examples they provide.
Anyone have tips or similar experience? I really wanted to be good at this...