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