Craft Range Red Ale - added sugar in error!

Sleepy

Got a load of craft beer kit from a friend whose wife wanted the space in their kitchen back a few weeks ago and was delighted to get a couple of the Craft Range kits with it.

Started with the IPA kit and it's fermenting away nicely. Just put on the red ale to join it and realised afterwards that I stupidly copied the instructions for the IPA and added 350gm of brewing sugar in with the malt extract.

My guess is that this means I'm going to end up with a much stronger beer than the intended 3.7abv. Having realised my mistake I topped up to 25l rather than the intended 23 to try and counter this somewhat...

Anyone made a similar mistake before? Is it just going to be a lot stronger than intended or will it be undrinkable?

Bogwoppit

It will be absolutely fine, don’t worry about it

Sleepy

Should I allow a longer fermentation before bottling? Or do I just bottle as normal and skip the priming (as the extra sugars in the wort would be enough to feed secondary fermentation and carbonate the beer?

BeerNut

Sleepy wrote: »

Should I allow a longer fermentation before bottling? Or do I just bottle as normal and skip the priming (as the extra sugars in the wort would be enough to feed secondary fermentation and carbonate the beer?

Your gravity readings are your guide here. Let it ferment out completely -- wait until you're getting the same reading several days apart -- then prime and bottle as usual. Never bottle a beer which hasn't finished fermenting.

Bogwoppit

Exactly as beernut says, stop looking at the instructions and use your head.
The beer will ferment out fine and the only way to know it’s finished is my monitoring the gravity, bubbles mean nothing.
Prime as normal.

sharingan

there are brewing calculators that will let you work out what the extra sugar will do to the beer in terms of alcohol.

OTOH 370g sugar will add somewhere close to 1% ABV to the 25L. So if you were expecting 23L of 3.7% ABV beer, I think you now might get 25L of 4.5% ABV beer.

hatrickpatrick

Others can correct me I'm wrong here, but taste-wise I would have thought 3.7% was on the low end of the scale for a red ale, and as such this will probably improve the taste to some degree, albeit at the expense of the "session" nature of the beer it'll make. So it certainly won't be undrinkable, but if you were going for lower alcohol you'll probably want to drink it in smaller servings - do you have any of the smaller multipack (330 or 355ml) bottles lying around?

sharingan

depends on how much malt was in the `brewing sugar`. If it was all malt extract, I would agree the flavour would be improved. But its likely that the brewing sugar is mostly dextrose that will ferment out completely leaving no flavour, just alcohol.

Sleepy

Yep, the sugar was just dextrose. I actually had some spray malt but thought it was only for use in stouts / porters! Know better for next time!

The bubbling on the air-lock had finally dropped to a low enough level (once an hour or so) for me to feel comfortable bottling it yesterday so I'm now bottle-conditioning 42 bottles of Red Ale along with the 41 of the IPA I bottled up last week. Filled a shot glass from the dregs of the Red last night and had a taste when the yeast had settled, it doesn't seem like it'll be anything to write home about but assuming it doesn't go downhill in the bottle, I've definitely paid for worse!

hatrickpatrick

It will taste significantly better if you give it an extra couple of weeks at fridge temperature once it's finished carbonating a week or two from now. All beers tend to taste quite 'plain' straight out of the fermenter and even after a week in the fridge, in my experience but if you can cold condition for longer than that it'll improve substantially. My beer fridge only has room for 12 upright bottles so I tend to only be able to do shorter conditionings, but in the winter when it's cold you can store them in a crate outdoors in a shed or dark corner, and after several weeks they pretty much inevitably develop an epic "draught beer in the pub" taste to them somehow.:D

Sleepy

I think I brewed these in / have been storing these in too warm a room. Moved the bottled IPAs and Red Ales to the shed over the weekend. Have had a dozen of the IPAs in the fridge for about a week and tried one last night. It's undrinkable. There's was no hop aroma or bitterness, and an anti-septic like aftertaste. I didn't have no-rinse sanitiser at the time I did these and used Milton for the sterilising. Wondering if I didn't rinse it out properly...

Since the red had been in the shed for a couple of days and was fairly chilled I tried one of those too and it also seems a fail.

The kits were both out-of-date when I made them so I wasn't expecting wonders but disappointing so far that I seem to have brewed and bottled two undrinkable beers. Will leave them to bottle condition for a few months more to see if there's any improvement but sadly, it's looking like the lot will be going down the drain.

BeerNut

Sleepy wrote: »

an anti-septic like aftertaste

I have heard of Milton doing this, though other people use it with no problems. Chlorophenols could equally be a water-related issue, or a random infection.

Sorry this batch didn't work out.