Cidery Flavor
The Strange Brewer
and while it tastes close to stuff he drinks there is a noticeable tang
to it in the after taste with a bit more malt flavor than I believe
he's used to..While i welcome the hints of malt he complains of the
very slight apple like tang....Now this was a batch brewed from Dried
Light Malt Extract with a bit of rice powder extract and whole
hops....any ideas of how to reduce the tang for the next batch? It's
third on the list so ive got about a month for any ideas....
The "apple cider flavor" you discribe is classic for beers that have been prepared using large amounts of table sugar, invert sugar or corn sugar. The beers also tend to come out thin-bodied (Like most canadian and american lagers) Some beer kits used to be made with large amounts of cheap sugar in the extract, both to lighten up the body and to pad the bottom line by salting the ingredients with cheap adjuncts. I would look at the ingredients in the dired extract you used. At this date, I am unaware of any reputable homebrew suppliers that still use this dodge, but since I am exclusively an all grain brewer, I am not all that familiar with extract ingredients. Another cause is the possibility that you are detecting acetaldehhyde as "flavor" when in fact it is actually an aroma. This can be caused by yeast releasing it as a byproduct of fermentation, but this aroma is generally either scrubbed away by the CO2 released in fermentation or reabsorbed. It's a property that is often noticed when you drink "green" or incompletely fermented beer. It can also be caused by temperture shocking the yeast and causing it to settle prematurely. If this is not the case, you might try letting the beer lager a while longer to see if the acetaldehyde will be reabsorbed.You might try a different yeast for the next batch. Acetaldehyde can also be caused by insufficient O2 in the wort when the yeast is pitched. Also concevable, but unlikely is that in using dry yeast in particular, you may have a batch that didn't have enough glycogen reserves. This used to be a problem in the early days of homebrewing, but with quality controls these days, it's pretty unlikely. Poor yeast nutrition is another cause of this, and is largely to blame when using recipies that have large amounts (40-50 percent) pure sugars. One way of avoiding this is to add some yeast energizer in the boil or even boiling a tablespoon of bread yeast to provide yeast nutrients at the pitch. Also remember to keep the lagering temperatures low, below 46 f. because higher temps encourage the production of acetaldehyde. Bottle conditioning with weak yeast can also be a culprit here.
Hope this helps you out!
The Strange Brewer
"Vitae sine cervesae sugat!"
(Life without beer sucks!)
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