What makes a beer... bad?

[edgeofblade]

I've noticed that beers, even ones that I thought were dead on arrival, get better with age, and even undrinkable can turn into drinkable. As long as you aren't brewing with bleach-saturated fermeters, got the temps right, didn't get lightstruck, sanitized correctly.... you know, the basics... the beer will tend to fix itself with time, either in the bottle or with a long primary.

So, discounting the elementary mistakes or off-the-wall experimental brews, if I started picking random malts, hops, and yeast blindfolded, what kind of mistakes might I make that make for a beer that was bad from the inception.

 

[IrregularPulse]

A bad recipe, no matter how well executed, will just plain taste gross. It's like cooking. You can take 1000 good ingredients, but I bet you could make some pretty disgusting dishes from them no matter how well you technically cooked it.

 

[McGarnigle]

You probably could produce a good 'random' beer, provided you limited your malts to base malts (i.e., you can't make beer that is 50% crystal, etc.), and you adjusted your hops by AA%. You take a recipe designed for Saaz and replace with the same amount of Chinook (not adjusting for AA), and it will probably not be good.

Still, there are combinations that work better than others. I think it largely comes down to a strategy for what you want to highlight: malt, hops or yeast. If you want to taste the Cascades, then don't load up on specialty grains or use a malt-accentuating yeast like Windsor. But these sorts of errors are less fundamental than what I mention above, where you wouldn't even get something drinkable.

 

[mixedbrewer]

Proportion is everything. I have been making recipes off the cuff for over a year now. Every so often one tastes a little odd because of too much bittering hop, or too much sugar... but all in all its not too tricky.