Nizmoose
Well-Known Member
So after at least a year of reading scared and confused off flavour threads of little helpful information I have to cave and create one of my own. I cannot work out whether what I'm tasting is a function of the recipe or if it is an off flavour. This is the second time I've gotten it and I'll give both recipes. The only way I can describe the flavour is perhaps herbal or grassy but I've never tasted a definite grassy beer to compare it to. My problem is I havent really tasted any off beers at all so I'm going in blind.
The first time this flavour came up was in an IPA and it wa pretty strong, the recipe is as follows:
13L batch size
3.25kg Pale
200g Crystal
12g magnum @ 60
20g magnum and 20g crystal @ 5
12g each of magnum crystal and citra dry hopped for three days
The off flavour appeared before dry hopping and didnt seem to subside after dry hopping, perhaps foolishly after getting ready to bottle this batch, for the first time in my brewing career, I took the fermenter to the lawn and heartbrokenly opened the tap. One thing I noticed this time is that the hop character was completely dead, there wasnt anywhere near as much nice hop character as expected and I say this because I brewed the same beer months before and it had a beautiful hop aroma and flavour. This stands out to me as a key point I just dont know why and Im hoping someone does.
Fast forward to today and now in an Amber Ale I have a similar smell and taste but much more muted, the hop character is also next to non-existent but the hopping levels in this batch are much less:
2kg maris otter
200g crystal
100g amber
5g columbus @ 60
4g columbus and 4g cascade @20
3g each of colubus, galaxy and cascade @ 5
and I decided today to dry hop with 5g each of columbus and galaxy to see if I can mask it.
Both of these beers were fermented with US05 but I have brewed a perfectly good beer with the exact same yeast (100B cells taken from starters to remake the next starter) in between both of these beers. One last detail is that the amber ale isnt cloudy, its nice and clear by normal standards.
Any help here would be massively appreciated and I know its hard to nail it down without tasting it but I'd love to know where I'm potentially going wrong!
The first time this flavour came up was in an IPA and it wa pretty strong, the recipe is as follows:
13L batch size
3.25kg Pale
200g Crystal
12g magnum @ 60
20g magnum and 20g crystal @ 5
12g each of magnum crystal and citra dry hopped for three days
The off flavour appeared before dry hopping and didnt seem to subside after dry hopping, perhaps foolishly after getting ready to bottle this batch, for the first time in my brewing career, I took the fermenter to the lawn and heartbrokenly opened the tap. One thing I noticed this time is that the hop character was completely dead, there wasnt anywhere near as much nice hop character as expected and I say this because I brewed the same beer months before and it had a beautiful hop aroma and flavour. This stands out to me as a key point I just dont know why and Im hoping someone does.
Fast forward to today and now in an Amber Ale I have a similar smell and taste but much more muted, the hop character is also next to non-existent but the hopping levels in this batch are much less:
2kg maris otter
200g crystal
100g amber
5g columbus @ 60
4g columbus and 4g cascade @20
3g each of colubus, galaxy and cascade @ 5
and I decided today to dry hop with 5g each of columbus and galaxy to see if I can mask it.
Both of these beers were fermented with US05 but I have brewed a perfectly good beer with the exact same yeast (100B cells taken from starters to remake the next starter) in between both of these beers. One last detail is that the amber ale isnt cloudy, its nice and clear by normal standards.
Any help here would be massively appreciated and I know its hard to nail it down without tasting it but I'd love to know where I'm potentially going wrong!