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Residual Sweetness
I recently did an American Brown which wasn't quite to style. It had a high OG and has a decent amount of alcohol in it. It tastes good but there seems to be a lot more residual sweetness than I would like. I have it kegged right now and have drank at least a gallon and a half of the 5. Wondering what I can do to fix it. A friend told me to put it in a carboy and try to pitch more yeast. I'm thinking maybe I just won't mess with it and live and learn. Just want to get the experts opinion 
I would redesign the recipe and rebrew it. Post the recipe and many people here can help. (I for one really love brown ales so I'd be into seeing what you did and try and help out).
I think many of us want to become better and better brewers. To that end, redesigning a recipe and rebrewing it serves that purpose better than any other technique to rescue a beer. If you learn to rescue beers then you aren't focusing on brewing beer. Thats just my opinion.
I'll be the first one to pour out something not great and try again versus trying to fix it.
Thanks Brewchez. That sounds like a good philosophy to follow. It's not bad and it's definitely not going to get thrown out. I was attempting an extract clone of Dogfish Head's Indian Brown Ale. I had no intentions on getting a beer that would be exactly like the real thing, especially considering I ended up substituting some hops and using brown sugar instead of dark brown sugar. I just wanted to get a tasty beer and get away from doing the kit beers I've been doing this whole time.
Extract
7.00 lb Light DME Extract
Specialty
0.62 lb Amber Malt Grain
0.50 lb Chocolate Malt (US) Grain
0.62 lb Crystal 60L Grain
0.12 lb Roasted Barley Grain
0.50 lb Brown Sugar
0.50 oz Warrior at 60 mins
1.00 oz Saaz at flameout
Wyeast 1187 - Ringwood Ale™
I steeped the specialty grains for 30 minutes at 155 or so degrees in 3 gallons of water. Brought it all to a boil and added the DME, Brown Sugar, and Warrior hops. Boiled for an hour and turned off the stove and added Saaz. Cooled wort down and added to primary bucket topping up to 5 gallons.
The OG I can't quite remember. Close to 1.070 I think. I know it fermented down to 1.017 after about a week. I tested it over a few days to make sure it was done. Then I kegged it and let it sit outside the fridge for 4 or 5 days before putting it in the fridge and putting the co2 to it.
It doesn't look to me like your specialty grains are out of whack enough to cause the residual sweetness.
So I'd would wonder if you could have driven the gravity down a little more with fermentation.
If you didn't use a starter I'd try that, or next time pitch two packs of the same yeast you used before.
Try and aerate the wort well after you top off. Meaning get it to pitching temp (say 68Fish), seal your fermentor and then shake it really well for a few minutes, take a break and repeat two more times. Then pitch the yeast.
Or if you already feel like you had really good fermentation practices, I would maybe go to 6.5lbs of extract and use 0.5lb of table sugar. I have had good luck using that method to get my extract beers to dry out more than they would have normally.
The recipe looks like it could be an interesting winner, with just a couple fermentation tweaks.
Good luck. Keep posting with the results.
Thanks. Doing a starter is the next big thing I think I need to tackle in my process. Currently I use the slap pack and let it blow up and then just pitch it. I started doing the yeast pitching calculator on my last batch at Mr Malty's site and realized I'm not pitching enough. I'm not really sure what I need though. a stir plate and a flask with some DME is what I've gotten out of my limited research.
As for getting oxygen in it I usually boil about 3 gallons and after it's cooled down I poor it into the bucket and then back twice before adding up to 5 gallons and I make sure to let the top off water splash around pretty good too. I hope that's enough to get it oxygentated. I'm currently not doing anything to remove the hot or cold break. I'm only knowledgeable enough actually to know about those terms and know very little about what it is or how I can limit it in my process.
Any tips for me out of that info? Thanks so much!
pinion wrote:
As for getting oxygen in it I usually boil about 3 gallons and after it's cooled down I poor it into the bucket and then back twice before adding up to 5 gallons and I make sure to let the top off water splash around pretty good too. I hope that's enough to get it oxygentated.
You could shake it as much as you can stand, and it will still only saturate a limited amount of oxygen. Aquarium pumps can get a bit more in, pure O2 blast is really the only way to get a much higher saturation.
A starter and good oxygenation will certainly help attenuation and help avoid off flavors from a healthy ferment, but as far as this batch goes you got 76% attenuation, pretty much the max that yeast will provide on extract.
So how does DFH get a 1.070 beer to seem drier? Flaked maize. i include that in my IBA clone recipe that I have since tweaked to fit my liking, which is the Kodiak brown recipe listed in the recipe section here. Sam calagione confirms this by talking about the IBA recipe in a past episode of Brewmasters.
So I would assume you may not be tasting residual sweetness, you are just not experiencing the dryness adjuncts can deliver.
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