Alrighty, so about three weeks ago I brewed up an English Brown Ale using a Brooklyn Brew Shop kit. It fermented pretty warm, so it's really fruity from the yeast (not to style, but whatever). I carbonated with table sugar dissolved in warm water using a calculator to get final carbonation at 2.0 vol CO2. It's been carbonating for a week and I accidentally knocked over a bottle yesterday and it gushed a bit, so I decided to open it up and give it a shot. I was struck by how thin and watery it tasted. I'm guessing the issue here is poor brewhouse efficiency- that I didn't manage to extract enough sugar from the grain. Would this guess be correct? How do you guys suggest getting a bit more body in the beer so it doesn't taste thin and tea-like? Thanks!
I'm going to preempt the inevitable by asking you to post the full recipe and your process. The forum needs to know what you did before we can suggest what you may have done wrong.
For someone who just joined BA, you definitely picked up on a common issue here For the OP, posting the recipe would help a lot here, we don't even know if this is extract or all grain brewing. Did you happen to take a gravity reading?
Personally, English session beers tend to taste a little thin to me. The malt usually takes a couple of months before I start to appreciate those beers. Beyond that we'll need a recipe, OG, FG, and the yeast strain that you used. Common things you can do to thicken a body: Add maltodextrin or carapils malt Add crystal malt (also adds sweetness) Mash at a higher temperature (if doing all grain) Boil longer to increase OG (thereby FG) Use a less attenuative* yeast (a yeast with less attenuation to increase FG) *I might have made up the word attenuative. I just stumped Google.
If have brew few batches of one gallon brewing kit , keeping the mash temp to the right level is probably your answer. The obstacle lay on mash size that is very small in mass and hard to control. Nothing need to add to the kit, use cooler to mash or best size up to 5 Gallon.
Sorry about not posting the recipe. Here are some details: Unknown grain bill since it was a kit. All grain.Mashed for 60min at ~150F but the temp dropped to 144 at times. I forgot to mash out at 170F before sparging with 170F water (sparged with 1qt water). Boiled 1.5gal for 60min. Good rolling boil. Added 0.5qt water to bring final volume up to 1gal. Didn't do an OG reading since for whatever reason I thought it'd be a waste since the batch was so small- I've sense started doing OG readings (on a cider I'm making now). Pitched one whole pack of yeast (unknown type since it was a kit) per directions and aerated for 10min by shaking per directions. Fermented for 14 days at approximately 74F (I know this is too hot- I'm solving this now by using a swamp cooler on my cider and temps are down to around 69F average +- 2F).
I started with a Brooklyn Brew kit too. I wasn't too thrilled with the results. I think your mash temp was the issue (or main issue), way too low. I wouldn't worry too much about the mash out. It had been a few years since I had done a 1 gallon batch, but actually did one as a test batch yesterday. I had a hard time holding my target temperature even while mashing in a warm oven.
Mash-out is old school and adds an unnecessary step to the process. The primary point of failure in the OP's process is the sparge temperature. The sparge water temperature needs to be hot enough to raise the grain bed temperature to no more than 170°F. After mashing for an hour at 150°F ... the grain bed temperature cooled into the 140s. In order to raise the grain bed temperature to near 170°F ... the sparge water temperature should have been ~190°F. Sparging the grain bed with 170°F water left sugars behind ... reducing extract efficiency and wort density.
I had this over carbonation issue with my first Brooklyn kit as well. On my next kit I waited 1 week longer to bottle and no more over carbonation. Still tasted like crap though hehe
It's unnecessary in the sense that it's not essential to make beer. But it can be very useful in helping top lock in a desired sugar/dextrin profile.
Alright, thanks for all the responses! I've been reading a lot about homebrewing recently so I figured it was something with efficiency. I'm going to be shifting gears to a 2.5gal BIAB system here for my text batch, so hopefully that makes it a bit easier to get the efficiency up. I got another kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop last year for Christmas and it was pretty thin and everything too- I just figured it was shit because it was my first time. It's pretty clear now that it's shit because following their directions don't lead to ideal brewing. I didn't have overcarbonation issues with my first kit, and based on the bottle I tried I'm not having issues with this one either (it just needs another week to carb). I used the online TastyBrew priming calculator to get it right and I think it's working out okay. It's just the actual body that's super thin.
