Adding bittering hops during fermentation?

[axematt]

Gday All.

As the title suggests, is this doable? I have a Cerveza K&K that I thought I wouldn't use any bittering hops during the mix up, don't ask me why.. After tasting 5 days into fermentation, it's tasting pretty boring and bleah! Was looking to bitter it up a bit.

Cheers and Beers!

 

[dkril]

Gday All.

As the title suggests, is this doable? I have a Cerveza K&K that I thought I wouldn't use any bittering hops during the mix up, don't ask me why.. After tasting 5 days into fermentation, it's tasting pretty boring and bleah! Was looking to bitter it up a bit.

Cheers and Beers!

If you just add any decent volume of hop tea it will dilute it, dropping your ABV, affecting the mouthfeel and may affect the balance substantially.

I've made the opposite stuff-up (double dose of bittering hops), so I made a matching batch with no bittering hops (but did add flavour hops, as I'd somehow got those right in the first batch). Blended both batches into kegs and tasted spot on .

 

[axematt]

I was thinking of putting maybe 1/2 L of a hop tea in the keg before transferring..it would be a total guess obviously, and may make no difference perhaps with that volume? Maybe I should just dry hop for taste and use it as a lesson learnt

 

[Let's Brew Beer]

I would advise against dry-hopping with bittering hops, I recently threw down a quick K&K and sexed it up somewhat with some flavour hops. Decided late in the piece to dry-hop but didn't do my home-work and discovered they were actually bittering hops i was dry-hopping with. Turned out eye-watering puckeringly bitter. Time has mellowed it somewhat but i can still detect that stringency. My 2c FWIW.

 

[Schikitar]

You could make a mini beer at around the same OG, bitter it accordingly and add it your brew to ferment. As it's a just a K&K it won't affect the malt profile but will allow you to adjust the hop profile.. a hop tea is fine but it will dilute your beer.

 

[Let's Brew Beer]

What is the size of the batch? If its a 23L batch half a litre of hop tea will be bearly noticeable. By noticeable i mean dilution-wise. How many hops were you planning to add?

 

[mongey]

Any time I have tried to fix a beer in the fermenter I have just ended up wishing I left it

just drink it as is and make the next one better.

 

[axematt]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm starting to think that, as mongey said, just drink it as is and don't do it again!! Although, I like the mini brew idea... While we're at it, any advise on a good dry hop for this style of beer?

 

[Schikitar]

If it makes you feel better, I just dumped 25L of an ESB I made (due to some substandard ingredients I shouldn't have used) so it got tossed. A lot of people say you should drink it anyway to learn from your mistakes but I don't agree with drinking something I don't enjoy and I've already learnt the lesson, no sense in punishing yourself!

 

[axematt]

Oh yeah, totally agree! If this tastes like crap, I wont be drinking it, not into that either. I have 4 other kegs of bloody nice beer to drink, so not that hard up for a beer. Thought there might be a magic cure for this stuff up is all, but it looks like too many unknowns and variances to be bothered with. onwards and upwards!

 

[peterlonz]

It's going to cost little in dollars or time to make up a hop tea as you would have if you'd followed the recipe without modification. Just add that asap.
No noticeable dilution issues that I can see. The result surely will me an improvement, give it a go!

 

[Schikitar]

Yeah I'd definitely try a fix before I went the dump.. hmmmm.. that didn't sound quite right..

 

[yankinoz]

Get isomerised hop extract. It's what Corona uses anyway, along with a shitload of sugar.