+1
I’m not sure whether the LHBS employee had your interests in mind or the store’s interests in mind. On your second batch maybe it’s too early to start looking at preboil techniques when you probably have some work you could do on the postboil side. OTOH, I’ve heard of so many HBS encouraging people to brew with extract for all sorts of demeaning reasons because extract sells at a premium and it’s harder to go online and buy a drum of extract than it is to buy a sack of grain. If you’re hearing more of this advice to stay on extract then maybe it’s time to find a new shop.
Not sure what happened. I took a FG reading today and fermentation seems done. I hit the FG number on the box perfectly, but the beer tasted terrible. When fermentation began it was letting off delicious aromas, what I tasted today didn’t even taste like an IPA. I didn’t get a big taste as I added my sanitized hydrometer right to my beer in the fermenter but it didn’t even smell appealing.
Should I continue to bottling or just toss it?
I took so many steps to ensure sanitation, what happened?!
One FG reading? Or was this the second one? You need two separate readings at least 3 days apart that are the same number. Don’t trust suggested final gravity from a recipe.
I wouldnt trust fementer aroma as a true indication of what the beer really smells and tastes like, especially dry hopped. The ring of dried up yeast and schmutz can be quite deceiving.
This was only my first FG reading, I will take another in a couple days and proceed to bottle. The aroma really threw me off, what you said really eased my mind.
I hope it tastes like I imagine!
No guarantees but what the heck, right?
I bottled it after taking my second FG reading today. I made a number of mistakes. First, I forgot to add the priming sugar solution to the bottling bucket before siphoning the beer. So after the beer was in the bottling bucket I added the priming sugar dissolved in a pint of water. Secondly, I added a bit of the priming sugar solution straight from the boiling pot it was in to the beer. It was over 140°! I didn’t add a lot before I realized my mistake, thank God. Lastly, I forgot that the bottling bucket had a spigot so I took the siphon from the fermenter and plopped it into the bottling bucket. My 11 year old neighbor reminded me the bottling bucket had a spigot when she came over to see what I was doing.
I also tasted the beer from a bottle that didn’t fill enough to bother capping it. It tasted God-awful. It was not a very good taste. Saying it tasted like ass would be giving it a compliment. Do you think it is infected?
Its really hard to say from a distance but probably.
Could it be from my fermentation temperature? I have absolutely no control over it and live in sunny San Diego. I put my fermenter in a closet with a thermometer attached to the wall. The thermometer is regularly over 80°. Or was it something I did; wasn’t clean enough, let something get into the wort, etc?
That kind of temp can definitely be a problem.
Yeah if the closet is at 80o the beer was probably fermenting at 85o or 90o at its peak, which is about 30o higher than I would want to do for a west coast IPA.
The terrible taste is likely fusel alcohols and other off flavors from the high fermentation.
An inexpensive solution is to pick up a rubbermaid container for a few bucks at Target or whatever, fill it up about halfway with water, and keep your fermentor in there. Fill a couple of 2 liter bottles up with water, freeze them, and add them to the container. Swap them out a couple of times a day as you are able.
That should allow you to keep your fermentation temperatures down a bit. For most ales, try to keep the temperature of the fermenting beer below 70, especially for the first few days.
Try googling beer swamp cooler for further info.
I bottled and served my West Coast IPA this past weekend. A buddy of mine said he liked it, but I’ve always suspected he’s had bad taste, I absolutely do not (although I drink it or else my fiancee would give me endless s*** for pouring out 5 gallons). It tastes like no IPA I have ever tasted before, although some people tasted the hops, I don’t. The beer is also fairly cloudy, I would prefer it much clearer. I do not think it is infected, I definitely believe that you guys hit it on the head, the fermentation temperature was much too high.
I have looked into the fermentation bags where one places the frozen 2 liters in it to cool it. They are $62 on Amazon, do you guys have experience with these?
Thanks, brother. I am pretty limited on space, I have a Man Cave where I ferment, but it’s really just an outdoor closet where I keep my tools and stuff. I will look into options for a cooler because clearly I need one if I want to continue brewing.
Thanks all for the advice!
I have experience with the insulated fermentation bag you are talking about (Cool Brewing I think is the brand name). They work extremely well for a $60 investment. For a 5 gallon batch that’s in the early stage of fermentation, i.e., it is generating heat, you can easily get to mid-60F by swapping out two 1L bottles of ice every 12 hours or so in a 80F room. Once the fermentation slows down after a few days you can switch to swapping out 2 L once every 24 hours. Being well insulated and having the high thermal mass of all that beer with the solid liter bottles of ice in there, the temperature fluctuations are minuscule if you do consistently change the ice every 12 hours. Out of curiosity I monitored the temperature every 2 hours over a weekend and got +/- 1 degree fluctuation. What helps even more is if you can put the bag in the most interior closet in the house as the temperature fluctuations will be further minimized there. The other plus of that bag is that there is room for two 6 gallon carboys (a bit tight but it works). Way less messy than a true swamp cooler in my opinion. It’s also soft-sided so if you aren’t brewing you can just fold it up and store.