Boiled 60 mins with following hops schedule: 0.5 oz magnum, 60 mins; 0.5 oz fuggles, 15 mins; and 0.5 oz. fuggles at flameout.
Chilled to 62 F and added ll grams US05. Ramped temp slowly to 66 F and fermented for 18 days. Obtained identical FG readings two days apart. Cold crashed and bottled two days later.
Beer tastes very good except for a bit of residual sweetness I could live without.
How to git rid of that sweetness?
Do I need more hops? Do I need to mash at a higher temp?
Suggestions please and thanks in advance for your help.
What was your FG? Beers like this with a fairly high amount of specialty malts tend to finish a little higher. Not sure what brand of DME you used, but extracts in general aren’t as fermentable. Subbing out the DME in favor of more 2 row would be a good start. Upping your IBU a tad mext time would help, too, as would mashing a couple degrees cooler.
There’s not enough crystal malt there to account for much sweetness IMO. The DME may be responsible. If you were to brew it again I,d say leave put the DME and/or up te hops a bit.
FWIW, I recently brewed a beer with a pound of extra dark crystal…even though it finished at 1.002, it’s still sweet up front.
I’d cut the muchich back to a half pound, and swap the c60 out for a half pound of dark or extra dark crystal.
The half pound of dark crystal will give you a somewhat equivalent amount of flavor as the pound of c60, but with less of the sweetness/body issues. Yes, it’s not the exact same flavor as c60, but I doubt it would be noticeable.
Finally remembered where I saw the listing of extract fermentability - it’s in DGB. Ray shows Munton’s DME as 57% fermentable, where for comparison, Briess pils DME is said to be around 80%. That’s the residual sweetness here IMO.
In a triangle test? Probably not. From a beer one night to another the next? I think so.
How else did we end up on the tons of light crystal malt in a bitter bandwagon? From what British bitter recipes I’ve seen, a smaller amount of darker crystal is used more often than a larger amount of lighter crystal.
One caveat: I brew with invert. This may add some of the “missing” lighter caramel notes that aren’t found in the darker crystal malts.
Before you change your recipe (or not, you do you) try going for the balanced brown or the dry brown and see if that gets rid of the perceived sweetness.
This is DEFINITELY a case where the brewer should test if additional sulfate could be added to the finished beer to help dry the finish and improve the balance. Pour a glass of the beer and add a single pinch of gypsum to the beer and mix. While the dose won’t be precise, it should add somewhere around 100 ppm sulfate and that should be notable in the beer’s perception.
Sulfate does not make beer bitter, it makes them finish drier and that can help in diminishing a perception of excess residual sweetness in the beer.
IME using a malty profile doesn’t make a beer sweet, it accents maltiness. Two different things to me. I still say dropping the barely fermentable Munton’s DME for more two row fixes the issue. Different approaches.
Yeah, the FG in and of itself isn’t an issue. I just remember brewing extract beers where I added sugar to get good attenuation, and many of those beers (with a low FG) seemed sweeter than AG beers. Regardless, no harm in playing with water chemistry.
And there is some science-y type stuff that supports that some due to extract make-up (almost all of them have a carapils addition) and the fact that they have already been boiled once and by boiling them again for an hour your are getting more mallard reactions which can sometimes manifest as a sweetness.