So, for the first time, I grossly under-pitched and as a result, a beer that started at about 1.090 has finished at 1.028. This was-and still is -supposed to be a hoppy red ale. One that has more malt flavor, but hoppy aroma. With the high FG, I have achieved an overly malty tasting beer. I guess now, its more like a barleywine.
I have tried everything from adding more yeast, rousing, warming and even amalyse enzyme in an effort to lower that FG, but to no avail. So, I was thinking about getting about 1 1/2 to 2 gallons of distilled water onto my stove, plus 1/2- 3/4 tsp of gypsum, bring to a boil, add about 1 ounce of Simcoe for 20 minutes, then cool to roughly 170, and add about 2 oz of Amarillo and 2more oz of Simcoe. after letting the hops steep for about 30 minutes, I would dump it into my beer.
I think this will lower my FG a little, and add some bitterness to offset the sweet malt. Any drawbacks to making such a large volume of hop tea?
Thanks for any foresight and assistance.
If I were you, I’d make a lower gravity beer rather than a hop tea. Then blend that in after fermentation.
If you mash it low and it ferments out, you can bring down your gravity by blending it in.
Hop it heavily if you like, or don’t.
Blending with a lower gravity beer is a good idea. Personally, seeing you went 1.090 to 1.028, that does say barleywine-ish to me as you say. You could leave as is, or add several oz of dry hops and call it American barleywine - that’s probably what I’d do. I haven’t done what you’re proposing with the large volume of hop tea, but it could work - how well would be debatable.
EDIT - I see you said you grossly underpitched. That would definitely explain the high FG, aside from other factors on big beers like inadequate oxygenation, excess specialty malts, use of some malt extracts, lack of simple sugars, etc.
I’d think about pitching some fresh yeast (from a starter at high krausen) into the beer and see if it can knock down that FG rather than hope a hop tea doesn’t result in too much bitterness and thin the beer out too much.
If you do go down the route of boiling some hops in water, I’d be a bit worried about astringency. If it was me, I’d be adding some acid to the water to bring the pH down into the 5’s to try and minimise any harshness.
Hop tea has got to be one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever put in my mouth.
This almost begs for a comparative list.
;) Fortunately, when something is that bad, my mind blanks it out…kinda…
Well, I really don’t want to know the worse thing anyone has ever put in their mouth. I would, however, want to know if anyone has concocted a hop tea and used it to infuse flavor/aroma and to lower a FG. I don’t want an overly cloying beer, and I don’t want to bitter it to the point of astringency. I was hoping to get the best of both words going here. I could blend, but I had no intension of brewing anytime soon. I wanted to serve for Christmas as my wife’s family is coming in town. Barelywines are good, but not if they taste like syrup. I thinks I have also missed my window for dry hopping as I will need to carb the beer for a couple of weeks.
It sounds like the consensuses is no hop tea… That almost sounds like I am seeking permission. I guess I want to hear horror stories/success stories that involve anyone making a hop tea and what the outcome of their final product was.
Thanks again.
I did it once, years ago. It seemed to work.
I don’t recall, but I may have boiled the hops in some DME since the beer was still fermenting when I realized I had missed a hop addition.
I don’t think you will harm it by adding a hop tea. You might just not get what you expected.
I would be more concerned about diluting the beer to reduce the gravity, though I suppose that’s what I do when I top up my fermenters.
Get some iso hop extract to bitter it. Works WAY better than hop tea.
Are you bottling or kegging? Sounds like bottling? If dry hop time is an issue, you can add to the keg…
I was thinking about dry hopping in the keg. I have never had great success with that.
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Get some iso hop extract to bitter it. Works WAY better than hop tea.
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I don’t think my HBS has any iso extract. But since I have no clue as to what that is, they may. How is it used and does it simply bitter the beer?
I don’t think I’ve ever located any. Hopshot needs to be added to the boil.
Denny, where are you finding isomerized extract?
Morebeer in the past, but it looks like it’s been discontinued. Also from YCH Hops, but I don’t know if that’s generally available to homebrewers.
And so we come back to ways to make a hop tea…
On the last batch I wanted to do this, I decided to add bourbon and oak to one keg and coffee to another. You’d never know they were under-hopped.
I think there was another similar thread (not hoppy enough) where the brewer (I can’t recall who, but he’s one of the Canadian guys) just added a six pack of extra hoppy IPA to his keg. That seemed to work for him.
I had the opposite problem with a brew.
I didn’t put quite enough hops into a porter to balance the malt, and it was a bit sweeter than I preferred. Since I prefer malt forward beers vs hoppy beers and like coffee, I brewed coffee with room temperature water and let it set for two days before adding to the bottling bucket. It tasted good at bottling.
I relearned two truisms: less is often more: and the only thing worse than one bottle you dislike the taste of, it’s having 49 more bottles of the same.
Actually if you let it get to about 55 F, it does taste better.
Maybe I need to chill my sample from the fermenter to the temp I drink before testing the amount of anything I might consider adding to the batch.
Welp… I took a gallon of distilled water, added 1/2 tsp of Gypsum, put 1 oz of Simcoe in the bag and raised the temp to 180*. added another oz of Amarillo at that point… let that steep and allowed the temp to drop to about 170* and added one oz each of Simcoe and Amarillo. I let that steep for a while.
Then… I got scared. Really scared. I kept thinking about the poster who told me it would make him nervous to put in the tea without some sort of acid… and afraid of the astringency. So… I poured just under a half of the tea into my keg and let her rip.
Its carbing now… there should be a little carbonic bite after it sets up for the next two weeks. Anyway… its definitely a barleywine. A real young barleywine.I like barleywine so i’m not too upset about it. I just hope the tea didn’t screw things up… I did take a gravity reading and it only feel like .001 point.
Its beer!