FrankHilden
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- Joined
- Feb 17, 2016
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Hey homebrewers,
I am new to this forum and a beginner in homebrewing. My first two batches turned out really good but now I am in desperate need of help as my third homebrew got some really bad off-flavours and I cant tell what has gone wrong. I brewed an ESB using Maris otter, crystal malts, flaked maize, melanoidin malt, fuggles and safeale s04. I let it ferment and sit on the primary for three weeks at the temperature 19-21c before bottling.
Already when I opened the fermenter I noticed this strong hot alcohol and burned smell but thought it was going to go away with time and conditioning. I tasted a couple of bottles at 2 and 3 weeks and the beer is well carbonized and has a nice head but the aroma and flavour has not changed and is almost undrinkable. The beer feels really heavy and I know that the gravity is high for a ESB (6.5% ABV) but still I dont think this burned hot alcohol flavours are because of the high gravity.
Here is my theory. After the boil, when the beer was chilled I measured the OG I noticed that it was 1.066 when it should have been 1.060 so I decided to boil some water and mix it with the wort to get the OG down. The problem is that I had already rehydrated the yeast and was ready to pitch. It took a very long time to cool down the water that I boiled before I mixed it with my wort so the rehydrated yeast sat for maybe 1.5-2.5 hours before it was pitched. I read afterwards that the yeast will start to starve if you leave it for too long so could this be the problem? On the other hand I had a really vigorous fermentation that started in about 6h so the femrentation seemed to be working well.
The other thing is that the FG was also lower than expected (1.011 compared to 1.016) so I immediately thought about wild yeast that could have caused the off flavours.
Do anyone have any theories what could have caused these off flavours?
I am new to this forum and a beginner in homebrewing. My first two batches turned out really good but now I am in desperate need of help as my third homebrew got some really bad off-flavours and I cant tell what has gone wrong. I brewed an ESB using Maris otter, crystal malts, flaked maize, melanoidin malt, fuggles and safeale s04. I let it ferment and sit on the primary for three weeks at the temperature 19-21c before bottling.
Already when I opened the fermenter I noticed this strong hot alcohol and burned smell but thought it was going to go away with time and conditioning. I tasted a couple of bottles at 2 and 3 weeks and the beer is well carbonized and has a nice head but the aroma and flavour has not changed and is almost undrinkable. The beer feels really heavy and I know that the gravity is high for a ESB (6.5% ABV) but still I dont think this burned hot alcohol flavours are because of the high gravity.
Here is my theory. After the boil, when the beer was chilled I measured the OG I noticed that it was 1.066 when it should have been 1.060 so I decided to boil some water and mix it with the wort to get the OG down. The problem is that I had already rehydrated the yeast and was ready to pitch. It took a very long time to cool down the water that I boiled before I mixed it with my wort so the rehydrated yeast sat for maybe 1.5-2.5 hours before it was pitched. I read afterwards that the yeast will start to starve if you leave it for too long so could this be the problem? On the other hand I had a really vigorous fermentation that started in about 6h so the femrentation seemed to be working well.
The other thing is that the FG was also lower than expected (1.011 compared to 1.016) so I immediately thought about wild yeast that could have caused the off flavours.
Do anyone have any theories what could have caused these off flavours?