I “finally” had a batch I couldn’t stand to drink…it was a Bohemian pilsner for which the brewday and fermentation had gone flawlessly. Except for one thing.
As I was putting the aroma hops in for a 10 minute boil–some pelletized Czech Saaz hops–I thought, “Hey, those smell way more grassy than I’m used to for hops.”
And then I thought, “Meh, what’s the worst that can happen? It will probably just boil/ferment out, and be just fine.”
Oops.
The cooling wort smelled like a freshly mowed lawn.
The fermented beer upon kegging smelled like a freshly mowed lawn.
The carbonated beer smelled like a combination of grass and a touch of vegetable and nothing good could possibly come of that.
Lesson learned! Next time, I’ll trust my instincts when adding ingredients. If something seems off, I’ll do a quick-change for something better, even if it means I go off-style! (and I suppose this is also a classic example where unwavering adherence to “authenticity” is woefully deleterious to my final product).
Sucks. I’ve dumped more than a few over 20+ years, though most often to open up a tap for something I like better. Do you think the hops were actually Saaz? Did you bitter with Saaz only? It’s obviously easy to get a lot of vegetal matter bittering with a 2.5ish % AA hop. Did you dry hop? Just curious where the excess grassiness could’ve come from.
The supplier was reputable and the package well-labeled, so I’m inclined to think they were correctly labeled and that it was just a bum batch of hops. I’ve really never smelled hop pellets that were so strongly grassy…so much so that I made a note of it in my brewing log. I used another package in the batch (from a different vendor, also labeled Saaz) which smelled just fine (spicy and herbal, rather than mega-grass). I used a high-alpha bittering hop (so these were all late aroma additions), and didn’t dry hop, so I’m 100% confident that the grassiness was due to the particular package of hops.
I battled that precise problem a couple years ago in multiple Bo-Pils I brewed using saaz. Likewise, reputable dealer… but in the end, I dumped the remaining hops in the garbage and have not had the problem since… including saaz hops from the same dealer. But, for whatever reason, that particular bag of saaz produced some horrendous grass/vegetal-bombs that were utterly undrinkable.