Got a too-sweet beer on my hands... suggestions?
OK, so here's what I ended up doing - based on the feedback from you guys (thanks!). I made a hop tea - the liquid was about 60% water and about 40% of the beer. The idea was that I didn't want to dillute the beer too much with water, but at the same time, I thought 100% beer boil might create some caramelized flavors that I don't want. By my calcs., the tea would add 10 IBUs overall to the batch (based on Tinseth's formula).
I added the tea to the beer and let it go for a while. Tasted it recently and it was still too sweet - plus I did get some (though not a lot) caramel character that wasn't there before. It was a bit more bitter, at least, but hardly even close to balanced. Plus the mouthfeel is quite thick.
So I've opted to split the batch into two - one half got hit with brett - the other half is getting another dose of hop tea. Then, after they've had time to do their things, I'm planning on blending them back together. This should limit the caramel effect of any new tea somewhat (since it will only be in half the batch) and, on the other side, will also let me control the brett level a bit more.
As I see it, even if it all ends up being lousy, there's little lost at this point by trying - it's pretty undrinkable at this stage due to its thick mouthfeel and sweetness.
2 other solutions I did not think of before. You could try some of this: http://morebeer.com/search/103026/beerw … op_Extract a little expensive, but it should go a long way and last awhile, you'll always have some on hand. Hell the big breweries use it.
The second is to try krausening. I am going to try this with a saison I have. I am brewing a belgian blond with ardennes strain on friday, I am going to wait until about day 3 or 4 of the ferment, and pull off a couple quarts of fermenting wort, then add that to the saison to see if I cn get huge attenuation and really dry it out. If you have any belgians in your futre you coud try that. Just some more $.02 to add to the party.
deafcone wrote:
If it stil lis too sweet after trying tose things you might want ot consider taking some of the finished uncarbonated beer, boiling it with some hops for 45 minuted and adding it back to the beer and let it sit for a couple weeks. You should get some bitterness to offset the sweetness that way.
DC
I guess I didn't see this post before but I don't really think that will help with the gravity numbers that are being thrown about here.
Even if you can get bitterness into the beer, the resutl will be the same sweet flavor up front followed by a more bittered finish. But the sweetness will still be there.
In the end I think this is an exercise in the reality that its often difficult to actually save a beer. Learn from it and move on. Drink it if you want/can, but I'd dump it and rebrew it as my next batch while its still fresh in my mind what changes I need to make to my process.
Krausening may work too, because its the same things as pitching a new active slug of yeast.
Lastly, like I said originally, if this was an extract brew, or if you mash temp was too high (even 154F) a 1.037 finish from a 1.108 start is very well likely the bottom and it aint going to get any lower no matter what you do. The only way to srive it lower would be to get some sort of contaminating bug in there that will chew up the non-fermentable sugars.
Hell if you are bent on trying to get it to go lower just for shits and giggles now I'd suggest Beano...but I'd never suggest beano normally.
Haven't been able to participate on the boards (in this, my own plea for help thread, or in any others for that matter) for the last couple of weeks as I've been swamped by my so-called "real responsibilities," but I thought I'd post a quick update.
At this point, I consider this batch one to just play with. If I start from the point of view that it is pretty much "ruined", then nothing can go wrong and I can just try different things. Thus the last step I mentioned here: splitting into two batches and adding brett to one and hop tea to the other.
Well, that didn't do a damn thing; even the brett was inactive after a week (I know brett is a slow worker, but it ought to have at least done something in that time). So I went with brewchez's "shits and giggles" suggestion of Beano. I'd never tried it before, and it's not something I'd really ever considered using before. Anyway, I recombined the two batches, then put four crushed Beano caplets in the fermenter. I based the amount of Beano to use on this article from BYO's Mr. Wizard.
http://byo.com/stories/wizard/article/s … -you-think
Anyway, 48 hours later, the gravity has slid down from 1.030 to 1.024 (bear in mind it has been moored at 1.030 for about a month now)! It's still not especially drinkable - it may never be after all the stuff I've done with it - but it is proving to be quite an amusing thing to play around with. Beano does seem to work! I'm assuming that the brett is doing the work at this point (fine with me), but the principle is the same.
So I'm just going to leave it alone and see where it ends up. I'll have learned a lot about this beer for the next time I try to make it...!
I've often wondered if you could put your carboy, or your fermentation bucket on a stir plate with the stirrer actually in the beer. This seems to me like it might work especially for belgians.
Has anyone tried this? I think I might on my next belgian
Recently I read PH can affect fermentation in beer. You might want to g et some PH paper and see what PH the beer is at. It should be at about 5.5. Maybe the beano changed the ph enough restart some fermentation.
DC
bruguru wrote:
I've often wondered if you could put your carboy, or your fermentation bucket on a stir plate with the stirrer actually in the beer. This seems to me like it might work especially for belgians.
Has anyone tried this? I think I might on my next belgian
I have heard of blowing CO2 into the bottom of a conical fermentor before to rouse the yeast occasionally.
In order to do this on a stir plate you would need one with a much stronger magnet set up than the one you use for starters.
brewchez wrote:
Hell if you are bent on trying to get it to go lower just for shits and giggles now I'd suggest Beano...but I'd never suggest beano normally.
Why would you never suggest this normally? The article in byo seemed to suggest that it is a viable way to lower your fg and calorie count without affecting the flavor. Do you have a personal experience with beano that differs from their account? Just curious.
It seems according to the article that if one wanted to produce a style of beer with a lighter body and lower calorie count this could work. Although adjusting the grain bill beforehand would achieve the same end, the example in the article of splitting the batch might be a possible use for beano .
I'm not sure if I could bring myself to actually put beano in my beer (the above post being an exception). It just seems somewhat sacreligious.
Rph Brewer wrote:
brewchez wrote:
Hell if you are bent on trying to get it to go lower just for shits and giggles now I'd suggest Beano...but I'd never suggest beano normally.
Why would you never suggest this normally? The article in byo seemed to suggest that it is a viable way to lower your fg and calorie count without affecting the flavor.
The problem is there is no good way to control this. Beano will break down some of the complex sugars that are holding up your gravity into simpler ones so that your yeast can ferment them. Problem is how much beano do you add to get to your target FG. In most cases, you end up taking a 1.025 gravity beer down to 1.005 and its now too dry.
This reinforces my point that its just better to learn and rebrew in the future.
You can buy alpha amylase too rather than use beano.
All of these "fix" solutions (even when they appear in BYO) don't make better beer. The science of the beano trick is sound. But its application and functionality is difficult to control and predict; leading to a beer than can have new issues.
I am all for experimentation in brewing, its the only way to really become a better brewer. But experimentation and "fixing" a beer are very different things.
In my opinion, its just not really worth the time to try and fix a beer. I just learn from it, dump and rebrew it.
Don't dump it! I was faced with a similar problem recently with a Russian Imperial Stout. OG was around 1.099 and it finished at 1.037. The beer wasn't very drinkable by itself but when mixed with an American Wheat that I made it was somewhat passable. An even better option is to just save it for marinades and cooking. Overly sweet beers are perfect for cooking.
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