NB Three Hearted ale - too sweet?

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azingsheim

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Hey gang, In early november I brewed northern brewers three hearted ale (two hearted clone). the brew day went great and i followed all the fermentation and dry hopping directions with the kit. The problem that I'm having is that it tastes a little off....way too sweet and I'm not getting alot of hop flavor coming through. (unless I totally forgot what two hearted tastes like. made a 1 liter started and the yeast was 1056. Only thing that I can think of is that I used my new turkey fryer kit, but I made a porter the previous week and it turned out fine. One other thing is that i didn't use my wort chiller and i used an ice bath for about 5 gallons on wort and it took like 45m minutes to cool. Whats everyones opinion????
 
I brewed this exact same kit from NB 2-days ago - but I used the dry Safale US-05 yeast instead of the liquid yeast. It won't be ready to drink for at least 4-weeks but it does smell a lot like Two Hearted to me... (I can smell it now thru the airlock as it bubbles).

Can't wait to try it once it's done fermenting! :)
 
also forgot to mention its been in the bottle about 8 weeks now, so i don't think it's to "green"
 
Not sure why cooling it down a bit slower would make it taste sweeter than usual. I made this kit back in July and it turned out to be a plenty hoppy IPA that I was quite happy with. Seems like a plenty big starter to ferment out the beer but wyazz question is right on. If for some reason the beer finished with a higher than expected FG it could have ended up sweeter than desired. If it did end with a high FG you'd have to figure out why. Did the fermentor maybe get too cold?
 
It was pretty warm in the basement about 63 - 66 degrees the whole time. The starting grvity was about 1.065 and i got it down to about 1.014. I thought it would go lower but it didn't. The porter that I made earlier was starting of 1.058 and that only went down to 1.016. Not sure about this one.
 
That's a few points higher than my 2 hearted clone but not out of line at all. What was the recipe? AG/Extract & Hop additions?
 
Hey gang, In early november I brewed northern brewers three hearted ale (two hearted clone). the brew day went great and i followed all the fermentation and dry hopping directions with the kit. The problem that I'm having is that it tastes a little off....way too sweet and I'm not getting alot of hop flavor coming through. (unless I totally forgot what two hearted tastes like. made a 1 liter started and the yeast was 1056. Only thing that I can think of is that I used my new turkey fryer kit, but I made a porter the previous week and it turned out fine. One other thing is that i didn't use my wort chiller and i used an ice bath for about 5 gallons on wort and it took like 45m minutes to cool. Whats everyones opinion????

An issue I have seen in the past with some of the NB kits is that as hops alpha acid content varies by year, their kits don't always scale appropriately (since they deal in whole ounces of hops it is harder for them to tweak?).

Anywho, I brewed this one in extract a few years back and loved it. Not too sweet per se.

That said, the latest kits may not have the AA% kick or your particular brew may not have attenuated fully, although 1.014 looks right to me.
 
Not cooling as fast will make your beer seem less sweet, IMO. The longer the hops stay in the hot wort, the more stuff will be extracted into the kettle. The amount of bitter is debatable, but you should get more flavor and aroma, neither of which would be perceived as sweetness IMO.

I'd pick up a couple of 2H's and do a direct comparison. Your timeline indicates that your beer should be plenty mature and ready to drink.

I think this just goes to show how hard it is to duplicate a recipe.
 
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