Why are my beers so flabby, creamy?

[JeffLacoy]

Brought a few of my beers to a local brewery, bottled off a keg. One was that alien church clone recipe, the other just a very simple mild English bitter. One of the brewer's there felt as though he was getting some measure of dms in both if them. I thought the bitter was pretty good, wasn't thrilled with the hop hands clone, but wasn't terrible. He had recommended I go to a 90 minute boil on all my recipes, bar none.

Both of these were fine color-coded at gravity samples and kegging, but the iPa definitely darkened and appeared oxidized, although there was no mention of him detecting any oxidized flavors. I'm also getting the weird creamy/slick feel/taste of the iPa, and guess it's maybe hidden a bit in the bitter.

The iPa lacks any sharp hop character, rather just a muddled mess of flavors. Think the bitter was brewed on my base tap water, which is essentially <10ppm for all mineral content, and think the iPa was made at roughly 75:150 sulfate/chloride.

Just at a loss. Did do a recipe he gave me which was all pilsner malt, with a 90 minute boil and he gave me a pitch of a saison yeast off one of their active fermenters, which as of kegging was pretty damn good, yeast character seems spot on.

Dms thing a bunk idea, and look elsewhere? Or cheap 2 row, plus maybe a less than violent 60 minute rolling boil a possible cause, and likely leading to the presence of dms?

 

[madscientist451]

Are you doing anything with your water?
A super easy way to improve your IPA's is to buy distilled water for brewing and then add packaged "brewing salts":
https://www.morebeer.com/products/burton-salts-2-oz.html
Or, you can have your water tested and make your own adjustments.

Then, figure a way to do low oxygen transfers. One method is to brew a 4 or 4.5 gallon batch, ferment in a corny keg with a shortened dip tube and then push the beer to a serving keg.
If your boil is weak, try a 90 min boil and see if you notice any difference.
You'll have to start with more wort to adjust for more evaporation.

 

[jwalk4]

Hi Jeff,

Sorry to hear about your beers. While I can't say I can fix your problems, Maybe I can point out a few things.

1) Make sure you mean that your ratios aren't chloride 75:150 sulphate. For Hoppy styles, sulfate should be higher than chloride and in the 200-400 ppm range. Try for a ratio of 1:1.5 or 1:2.

2) Hey, try a 90 minute boil. What's there to lose? At least your local pro brewer took a stab at your problem. If I felt that there was a problem with my beers (and there have been many), and another brewer said they were perfect, Id raise my eyebrow.

3) Oxidation and HSA are back in vogue, and there is a lot of advice out there right now for brewers looking to avoid unnecessary O2 pick up. Try and implement a few of the following, and evaluate your results: preboiling strike water, underlet your mash, dose your liqour with the appropriate amount of NaMeta, etc. On the cold side, you can carb naturally in your keg, and do closed system transfers.

4) Maybe the problem isnt you! Ive had the unpleasant experience of buying stale ingredients before. In that case, your hobbled before you even pull out your mash tun.

Just a few thoughts.

 

[JeffLacoy]

Yes, I'm adjusting my water basically to style using the guidelines set on bru'n water. I've got really soft water, with miniscule amounts of chlorine, so my mash and sparge water get treated with about a 1/4 Camden tab each. Adjusting with just gypsum and sodium chloride, adjusting mash ph usually with nothing more than a millimeter or so of Lactic acid.

I'm perfectly happy with my beers, just looking to improve. I've already done the bottled water route, didn't see any significant improvement, and was far more inconvenient.

 

[MaryB]

Is your soft water via a softener in your house or natural? If you have a softener then your water already contains a lot of salt...

 

[JeffLacoy]

It's town water. Less than 10ppm of chloride, sulfate, Calcium, etc.

 

[LLBeanJ]

I'm also getting the weird creamy/slick feel/taste of the iPa, and guess it's maybe hidden a bit in the bitter.

This suggests your problem, at least with the IPA, could be diacetyl. How much dry hops was in that recipe? I was just reading yesterday a thread about heavy doses of dry hopping causing issues with diacetyl (from oxidation). What was your ferm schedule?

Edit to add: here is the thread...

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=631050

 

[Die_Beerery]

"George fix’s book “Principals of Brewing Science”, made me think about writing a quick post about it.

One thing I think ALL parties can actually agree on is the subject of cold side aeration, or CSA for short. George said it well here:

“The deleterious effects of oxygen uptake at any point in the brewing cycle is well documented. The only exception to this is the oxygen introduced at the start of the fermentation. It is true that there is a considerable variation among beer drinkers both with respect to their ability to detect oxidized flavors, and with respect totheir acceptance of these notes. Yet the track record is clear in both amateur and commercial brewing: Consistently successful brewers are invariably the ones who operate low oxygen systems. For most of the twentieth century, attention was focused on oxidation occurring after the end of the fermentation-so-called cold side aeration (CSA). Concerns about CSA are well founded since there are a number of relevant mechanisms, all of which are destructive to beer flavor.”

CSA is all over in any brewing texts and a simple google search will yield countless results. However George lays it out well here:

“Methods for such optimization are covered in, for example, in the references by Bamforth (1999) and Fix (1998). Following C. D. Dalgliesch (1977), it is useful to characterize staling in terms of three basic stages:

• Stage A is the period of stable, “brewery-fresh” flavor.

• Stage B is a transition period in which a multitude of new flavor sensations can be detected.

• Stage C products are the classic flavor tones involved in beer staling.”

He goes on to list an overview of the stages, the highlights of them being:

“Stage A beer is pristine in flavor. During stage B, Dalgliesch described a decline in hop aroma, a decline in hop bitterness,an increase in “ribes aroma” (or sometimes “catty” flavor), and an increase in sweet, toffee-like, or caramel tones. The terms ribes (or currant) and catty are widely used in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia to recall overripe or spoiled fruit or vegetables. Some tasters cite a “black currant” tone (Hardwick, 1978). In truth, these terms describe a wide spectrum of negative flavors developed when beer is in stage B. Toffee or caramel flavors can come from many sources, but those associated with staling will invariably have unattractive cloying notes. These effects are enhanced by residual diacetyl and also by excess heat treatment of wort. Finally, stage C products range from papery or leathery to sherry- or vinegar-like notes.”

While I will absolutely agree we rarely see the last stage of oxidation, we will see at least some of them. I hear about “B” ALL the time, and that is directly due to oxidation while kegging, or coming to complete fermentation and racking. I am here to tell you it doesn’t have to be this way! What we laid out in our earlier posts a surefire way to brewery fresh flavors almost indefinitely."

Taken from a blog post of mine here:http://www.********************/brewing-methods/cold-fermentation-and-spunding-results/

I would look into your kegging procedure.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Brought a few of my beers to a local brewery, bottled off a keg. One was that alien church clone recipe, the other just a very simple mild English bitter.

Sorry, are we talking mild, or bitter? Either way, you'll want some more calcium to help the various enzymic reactions. The bitter will benefit significantly from a teaspoon of gypsum in the mash, if it's a mild then swap some of the gypsum for calcium chloride. Mind you, with that water you should be brewing lagers, it's like Plsen water!

"That alien church clone" - I take it we're talking Coff's recipe to clone Tired Hands Alien Church NEIPA?

My immediate thoughts would be - you're doing a lot in the "danger zone" between flameout and fermented wort, sanitation is always a worry. And there's a lot in that recipe to go wrong - if you're not happy with the results, you need to simplify and take a step back in order to take two steps forward.

First things first - if an experienced brewer says you've got DMS, then you have DMS. 90 minute boils should take care of it now, but I would look at the quality of your ingredients. First of all - simplify them, whilst you're troubleshooting just go to a single malt and maybe no more than 2 hops. An obvious point to make is that hops are fragile things and we're now 12 months from the northern hemisphere harvest so if you or your supplier have left them at room temperature they will have degraded and oxidised significantly. That really won't help - obviously the best solution is to get the new harvest hops in a few weeks time in vacuum packs and then keep them cold, but that doesn't help the immediate problem.

But I would think more in terms of an APA or West Coast IPA for troubleshoooting purposes, a simpler recipe will make it much easier to work out what's going wrong. Also they will suit a sulphate-rich water, which will certainly give you better precision on your bitter flavours, which will be a start, even if a chloride-rich water is more appropriate for the Alien Church.

Another obvious area to look at is sanitation - one source of diacetyl is lactic acid bateria, but just generally it will muddy things if you have different sources of fermenting organisms. Is there any tubing that looks a bit tired, are there scratches in the buckets that could harbour infection? Bin them and replace.

On the fermentation side - what sort of temperature control do you have?