Grrr... who knew the burner got that hot

about 1.5 weeks ago my wife and I brewed a hefeweizen. all went fairly well, we missed some of our temps by a few degrees but our overall numbers were okay, our OG was a little low but that is because our volume was a little high. nothing to worry about there.

However, as usuall I put my IC in the kettle with 15 minutes remaining in the boil without first fishing out the hop bags. These are organic cotton hop bags so I don’t worry too much about them getting scorched like I would with nylon. And it has never happened before. course before I wasn’t boiling on a bayou classic SQ14. When cleanup was just about finished we discovered one of the hop bags had been pinned to the bottom of the kettle by the IC and had actually burned through! even under all that wort!

Well other than a nasty cleanup to get all that carbon off the bottom of my kettle everything seemed okay, the wort tasted fine and didn’t have any obvious burnt notes.

fast forward to 1 week later I took a sample of the extra 1 gallon I fermented in a separate jug and everything still tasted fine. super malty and great hefe yeast character. so no worries right?

now, yesterday we sampled the full batch, took gravity, down to 1.010ish so the missed temps don’t seem to have set up back to much. but tasting the sample there is a distinct campfire character. Grr.

Long story even longer, I was planning on putting my one gallon batch on some blackberries as an experiment but now I am thinking I will put the whole 6 gallon batch on berries to try to cover this camp fire taste. does it seem like that might work?

Recipe details

60% weyermann wheat malt
40% weyermann pils
1 oz hallertaur at 60 minutes

double decoction with protien rest

111f
130
f
150*
160* (should have been 168* this is where we missed out temp)

Perhaps that’s why it’s called a…  burner?  :wink:

Do you have a false bottom?

If not, that would be your fix.

That’s a bummer.

There’s a much less drastic and more inexpensive fix.  I lay a long handled nylon (?) spoon across the top of the kettle and hang the hop bags from that.  Something like this…

I’ve used a similar setup, except I hung a paint strainer bag from a pvc sleeve like this.

3508401527_20c7469937.jpg

Raspberry rauchbier, it could work if the burnt character isn’t too pronounced.  Personally I’d pitch it and brew again.

Yeah that would have been good. next time.

Sounds like it might be throwing good money after bad. Personally I’d write this one off and re-brew.

yeah you are probably right. I guess I will just package it and see if it fades over time. blah. can’t bring myself to dump it as overall it’s a good beer just with a slight smokey taste and I have plenty of bottles.

label it a smoked wheat and move on…

Great idea.  But I had the spoon laying around and it didn’t require any effort.  You KNOW how I hate that!  :wink:

That’s you keen sense of pragmatism at work.  ;D

Put a little liquid smoke in there?

FWIW  Schedule 40 PVC is rated for temperatures of 140 degrees F or less.

It’s not immersed in the liquid, only used as a retainer.