first batch...something is just "off."

Do you know any experienced home brewers who could taste it for you? Is there a club/homebrew store/brewery in your area that could give you some insight?

 

Can you post your recipe? It will help a lot to see what may have gone wrong. Did you use LME and maybe let some burn to the bottom of the kettle?

 

I'm sure they get it all the time. If you're friendly with the people there I think it'd be less awkward. If not, it may seem weird to have a stranger show up and ask them to taste his beer.

 

Well I would keep looking into it. I have burnt my share of LME as well and have never picked up on off flavors from it, although it seems entirely possible. Like I said post your recipe if you can and maybe it'll be of more help to see what's up.

 

Go in, buy a beer and maybe some food (i.e. patronize their business), schmooze a little and ask to talk to a brewer. Explain your situation and offer him a bottle and your email. Leave a big tip. Most brewers will probably be happy to help. They may or may not open your bottle on the spot tho. Make sure to say "please don't spare my feelings, or you're doing me no favors" or something to that effect. Overly nice feedback doesn't give you the info you need.

Or you could send a bottle to an experienced brewer on these forums. I'd love to try it, but I'm probably not the guy to give you the best feedback.

Also, it sounds like you may have burned it a little. I scorched a little on a stove top once, but it didn't affect my final beer enough for me to notice.

 

Yep, some more conditioning will do the trick. I had a similar experience with this taking longer than normal. Move a 6 pack to a warmer area of your house and wait a week. Then test with one not in the warmer area. The burned taste will either mitigate or be gone. It took mine about 2 months to taste just right.

 

Let's be realistic here. It's your first batch. There's a lot of little things that could have gone wrong (temperature control is a likely culprit here). It's really not fair to compare your first homebrew to commercial beers because you just aren't at that skill level yet. Your brews will never taste 100% identical to any commercial beer simply because your brew house is different and that is especially true if your fermentation schedule is different from their (as it inevitably will be). If you used a kit there's a good chance the ingredients are not completely identical to those used by the brewery which will make a difference.

It's a big difference whether the beer is "off" because it doesn't taste like the commercial beer you tried to clone or if it's "off" because there's a technical flaw in your process. More of a description about what is off might help.

 

As others have said, the color difference is most likely from one of 2 things, either scorching the extract, or steeping the grains too long especially if there were roasted / dark grains in there. Either one of these could also cause off flavors too. What I do when steeping is to bring to water to a temp then let them steep, as opposed to putting them in cold water and then bringing up the temp. It would help I you described what is "off" about your beer, to try to narrow down what happened. Finally, there is a learning curve to brewing; you can't. (or shouldn't ) expect a world-class brew first time out.

 

Boiling the LME for 60 minutes could have something to do with color of the beer. A lot of research i've done says that boiling LME for too long will darken it. Some people add it later in the boil to avoid this.

 

The first thing I see is "Steeped specialty grains for about 20 minutes...until right before the water boiled."
Did you leave your grains in the water and heat it until is was near boiling?
The way to steep grains is:
Raise water to desired temp (usually about 155ish) then hold temp and steep for 20-30 min. (may vary depending on recipe).
Then remove the grains. Do NOT squeeze the bag. Allow the grains to drain via gravity. Squeezing will extract tannins.

If you rung out the bag, or left it in the water while it was brought to a boil, you may have a very tannic (tanninic?) beer.
Tannins will give the beer an "off" flavor. The best I can do to describe it would be similar to a very dark cup of black tea. Think dry and bitter. It could understandably be described as a burnt or charred flavor.

I have scorched LME in the past as well, but the only problems it caused was a darker beer. I have never had flakes float in the wort.

 

I agree that tannins from poor steeping technique are a significantly possible culprit here.

Also, I've had "flakes" of "burnt" stuff in my wort before when doing extracts on a stove top. The uneven heating is actually more likely to result in scorching than a good hot flame from a turkey fryer or propane burner. However, I never noticed any burnt flavors from the scorching. Perhaps the beer was a bit darker, no biggie there.

I did start adding portions of the extracts later in the boil as well. Works fine. Only real problem is that if you're struggling to get a boil in the first place, you need to add them in small amounts or they'll kill your boil.

 

This is probably the culprit right here. At a minimum the grains got too hot and will start to leach tannins out from the husks. The tannins will contribute a astringency to the beer. It's also possible some of the grains got a little scorched from being on the bottom of the kettle while the heat rose that high. That would also contribute to that burnt flavor.

The color is likely due to darkening of extract during the boil. Affects the color but not the flavor.

This is bad homebrewer myth and has been debunked by BIAB brewers several years ago. Just squeezed the bag myself on a BIAB stout I'm brewing.

 

I don't know if squeezing brings out bad flavors, but I'm inclined to take reverseapachemaster's word that it doesn't. However, steeping at near boiling temps certainly would bring out tannin-y flavors. That's your most likely culprit.

Next time steepy more bettery.

 

Crickey!
Your beers is greener than green.

Give'em some more time in the bottle and report back in a few weeks about how good they got.