High Amount of Bitterness in 1st Brew

[beerrepository]

So my first beer has finally had enough time (3 wks) in bottles that I can taste it without worrying too much about it being green. I cracked one open last night, had a nice puff of co2 smoke sitting in the bottle. When I poured, it developed a lot of head and spilled over the glass, not sure if it was the pour or just slightly over carbonated.

The biggest problem is that this beer is very bitter. It has a very pronounced hop bitterness. It isn't undrinkable but it isn't good. The beer is a Brewer's Best American Amber Ale kit. It called for 1.25oz of Brewer's Gold for bittering. The recipe was built around a partial boil of 2.5 gallons, but I had the equipment, so I did a full boil. Would this cause a significant enough increase in hop utilization? Could that cause the flavor profile to get knocked out of balance?

 

[motobrewer]

1.25oz of 8%aa brewer's gold will be about 38 IBU's, probably explains it. what was the OG?

 

[beerrepository]

unfortunately i broke my hydrometer as i was about to take the OG so I don't know. I asked Brewer's Best if they knew what the AA was for the Brewer's Gold was, but she couldn't tell me. Here is the recipe

[size=+2]Amber Ale[/size]
[size=+1]10-B American Amber Ale[/size]
Author: Brewer's Best



Size: 4.32 gal
Efficiency: 75.0%
Attenuation: 78.8%
Calories: 187.31 kcal per 12.0 fl oz

Original Gravity: 1.057 (1.045 - 1.060)
|====================#===========|
Terminal Gravity: 1.012 (1.010 - 1.015)
|==============#=================|
Color: 19.61 (10.0 - 17.0)
|=============================#==|
Alcohol: 5.85% (4.5% - 6.2%)
|====================#===========|
Bitterness: 50.9 (25.0 - 40.0)
|================================|

[size=+1]Ingredients:[/size]
2.5 lb Amber Dry
3.3 lb Amber Liquid
1.0 lb Crystal Malt 80°L
1.25 oz Brewers Gold (9.0%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min
.5 oz Willamette (5.0%) - added during boil, boiled 5 min
1.0 ea Danstar 3767 Nottingham


[size=+1]Notes[/size]
Day 3 : 1018
Day 13: 1012

Bottled at 14 days

[size=-1]Results generated by BeerTools Pro 1.5.12[/size]

I didn't pay super good attention to how much I collected after the boil because I had problems cooling the wort down. I learned a lot from that disaster of a brew day.

 

[HickoryMike]

I believe hard water accentuates bitterness. Do you have really hard water?

Regardless, just forget about those bad boys for another week before sampling again. I don't think I ever had a bottled beer that was awesome after 3 weeks. Just because it's carbonated doesn't mean its aged to perfection.

 

[bh10]

Id expect nothing less than a bitter beer from what you posted. Doing a 5gallon boil instead of a 2.5 will raise the IBU's and since you have barely any flavoring additions, its going to be a bitter ale.

 

[elproducto]

You didn't adjust for full boil.
I recently did John Palmer's Cincy Pale Ale, and it called for an ounch of Nugget for the boil, and an ounce at 15min. left. I decided to do a full boil, and plugged in the numbers into beer smith.

I ended up using 0.5oz of each.

I'm a newbie, so take that with a grain of salt.

 

[beerrepository]

I believe hard water accentuates bitterness. Do you have really hard water?

its 323ppm, can't remember if that is high or not, but I do have a water softner.

You didn't adjust for full boil.

Yea, I didn't do anything with it. It was my first brew so I hadn't picked up any software yet. I now have Beer Tools Pro, so hopefully I can avoid this problem in the future.

 

[Jcmccoy]

The more you age it the hops will ton down. So if you can wait a few more weeks so how it tastes then.

 

[pwndabear]

listen, this is the first beer that i ever brewed. I am convinced that this recipe is garbage, not the brewer. My beer had the exact same characteristics that youre talking about. Thing is, this is also the SAME brew that one of my other homebrew buddies made and HIS beer came out the exact same way as well. We were as clean and sanitary as can be, followed the boil directions on the recipe to the T, and made out own fermentation schedule (i believe they say to keep it in the primary for 4 days) yet for his and my beer, they both came out the same way. Now a third person is saying the same thing... it's the recipe.

Stupidly, I dumped my batch. I really think that if you let it sit for a very very VERY long time, especially after not taking into account a full boil, it will ease up a bit on that tangy bitter flavor that gives such an awful aftertastse. Don't open anymore, really. Put 'em away for half a year and try again. But dont dump.

 

[mojotele]

Studies have shown hop utilization to be independent of wort gravity (citation). The recipe should've been fine using the same amount of hops in a full boil versus a partial boil.

That's just too many hops for an amber ale.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

Get 20 more brews under your belt and it won;t be bitter enough.

 

[JLem]

Studies have shown hop utilization to be independent of wort gravity (citation). The recipe should've been fine using the same amount of hops in a full boil versus a partial boil.

That's just too many hops for an amber ale.

I do not think that is quite accurate. As I understand things: yes, wort gravity does not affect hops utilization per se, however, more break material will essentially pull more hops compounds out of the beer with it. A partial boil wort will have a greater amount of break material relative to volume than a full boil. This means that a partial boil will have less bitterness because a lot of the bitterness ends up falling out with all that break.

 

[ekranzusch]

WEEEEEEE! Congrats you have achieved hop level: "the white part after the graph"
1.057 OG, 50.9 IBUs

Give it a couple of weeks and it will mellow out some...
Might want to tone that down a touch next time.

 

[ekranzusch]

Also, who the hell brews a 1.025 OG beer? Seriously!
LOL

 

[dfc]

Also, who the hell brews a 1.025 OG beer? Seriously!
LOL

O'douls.

 

[mojotele]

I do not think that is quite accurate. As I understand things: yes, wort gravity does not affect hops utilization per se, however, more break material will essentially pull more hops compounds out of the beer with it. A partial boil wort will have a greater amount of break material relative to volume than a full boil. This means that a partial boil will have less bitterness because a lot of the bitterness ends up falling out with all that break.

That's true, but apparently the effect isn't very substantial. SumnerH was making a habit of coming in to threads and schooling me on the current research on hop utilization. From another thread:

A smaller boil does have more concentrated break material which has some effect on final IBUs, but it's a far, far less dramatic effect than brewing software predicts.

Basic Brewing Radio actually brewed the same recipe with a full boil, a regular partial boil, and a partial boil with late extract additions, using the same hops in each one. The software predictions gave the same kind of wildly different IBU estimates that you're getting from Hopville (unsurprising, since there are about 4 algorithms that pretty much all brewing software uses), but when they sent them off to be tested they found that the actual IBUs in each were basically identical.

IMO, you're best off lying to your brewing software and telling it that you're doing a full boil regardless of circumstances. If you're doing a partial boil with all grain (which has substantially more break material than extract), you might want to adjust the hops up 10% or so, but even then not nearly as dramatically as any software will tell you.