Brewed a Rye Porter with my brewclub a couple of weeks ago. We all started racking to secondary and the beer tastes like dirty dishwater…watered-down and unpleasant. We know that the watered-down aspect is from being over-sparged but the taste is just nasty. Any suggestions?
50 gal batch; hard to quantify the sparge volume/temp - too many cooks
105 lbs 1.1 oz Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM) Grain 1 78.4 %
20 lbs 0.3 oz Rye Malt (4.7 SRM) Grain 2 14.9 %
4 lbs 15.2 oz Roasted Barley (300.0 SRM) Grain 3 3.7 %
4 lbs Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM) Grain 4 3.0 %
5.85 oz Columbus (Tomahawk) [14.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 5 21.3 IBUs
5.85 oz Goldings, East Kent [5.00 %] - Boil 15.0 min Hop 6 3.8 IBUs
10.00 oz Goldings, East Kent [5.00 %] - Boil 0.0 min Hop 7 0.0 IBUs
British Ale yeast starter
That sucks. Maybe it would make a decent vinegar? That’s a lot of vinegar.
Some years ago I went to a beer festival here in Belgium. At some point I decided that I didn’t like Belgian hops because they taste like dishwater. Eventually I realized it’s dishwater that tastes like dishwater. The servers weren’t rinsing the glasses in clean water.
You could throw a sour culture in and let it age. Maybe a little malto dextrine? To be honest the best way I have found to fix a bad beer is to dunp it and brew it again and fix any mistakes.
What is wrong with the beer? What do you mean by nasty? A couple of weeks is pretty short, but, if your whole club is brewing it, y’all must know what you are doing.
That is the exact reason why I stopped doing group barrel fill projects as there was always at least one or two questionable batches/brewers contributing their share that was just not right (off flavors). Way too much work and time for a crappy finished product.
Don’t know if it’s just me but I just genuinely feel bad for him. 50 gals and all that work and crappy beer to show for it. Can’t help it I’m an empathetic guy I guess.
Feeling bad for him and recognizing that you’re better off dumping it are two different things.
50 gallons, but each individual brewer probably only contributed 5. So the loss is 5 gallons of bad beer.
The other option, if you have the space and inclination, is to package it and wait. I don’t know if a bad beer will get better, but waiting is free especially if you have a spare keg.
