IPA Hop Schedule issues

[nickcaves]

Hey brewzers,

Brewed an IPA recently, pretty nice in my opinion, except for it's over grassy bitter aftertaste! Which kind of ruins it really. I'm thinking my late hop additions need tweaking?

Ingredients below, note that I separated 4L of the fermenting beer so I could dry hop with some Galaxy. This separate batch smells better on opening bottles, but still has the grassy bitter aftertaste. So I don't blame the dry hopping for the grassiness.

My questions are:

- Is Melba to blame for the over grassy notes?
- Did I use too much for 15 and 0 min hop additions?
- Was there something else (i.e. mash/sparge errors) that contributed to the bitterness and enhanced the grassy aftertaste?

Any thoughts are appreciated!
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Equipment: Grainfather

Grain Bill (all Gladfield) total 4.6kg
3.5kg American Ale
.43kg Gladiator
.43kg Munich
.23kg Light Crystal
.10kg Med Crystal
.10kg Dark Crystal
.22kg Rolled Oats

Mash Schedule:
16L water
45C for 30 mins
71C for 45 mins

Sparge:
16L @ 75C

Hop Schedule
15g Melba at 60 mins
45g Melba at 15 mins
45g Melba at 0 mins

Dry Hopping
1 batch (18L) 75g Melba dry hopped at 4 days before bottling
1 batch (4L) 20g Galaxy dry hopped at 4 days before bottling

 

[Dan Pratt]

melba and galaxy can both impart grassy flavours when dry hopped for more than 3 days, from experience .

how many days were they dry hopped for?

another thing for an IPA you have a tonne of crystal malts, just one or Munich would be plenty.

mashed at 71c....what was the Final Gravity?

 

[Lionman]

430g of crystal is quite a lot. Too much crystal malts can lead to weird mouthfeel and after taste. Not sure about grassy though.

Nothing wrong with your hap schedule from my point of view. with all that crystal malts you could double the amount you used with no drama.

How long has it been in the bottle for? Maybe its a bit green?

How fresh were the hops?

And yeah, your mash stepping is very strange.

You should really be doing a single 60m infusion of about 68c (lower by a few degrees if you want a dryer beer), raise to 76c for 10mins then lautering.

You must have a pretty high FG, coupled with a lot of crystal malts, topped off with not enough hops.

 

[nickcaves]

Dry hopped for 4 days, so I'll limit that by a day. The hops weren't all that fresh.
I'll go for less crystal too, I would definitely call the mouthfeel weird.
It's been bottled for 9 weeks now.
The step mash was just included in a recipe I found, the first time I've done that.
Post boil gravity was 1.049, ending at 1.010.

I'm brewing this weekend with some adjustments - I have some Cascade and Galaxy to use up this time.

Thanks for the suggestions Dan and Lionman!