troubleshooting recipes

Hey everyone.

I would like to get some input troubleshooting a recipe I used to make my first batch of beer. If you don't mind just reading through my notes and giving me any input you have, I would really appreciate it.
I started a saison back on 10/21/12 and it was my first beer. I brewed it as a 5 gallon extract batch. The recipe is below:

For 30 minutes at roughly 160 f (this fluxuated between 160 and 165) I steeped 2.5 lbs of Munich Malt, 1 lb Malted Wheat

I then added 3.5 lbs extra light DME, i lb of white table sugar and brought the tea to a boil.
hops (pellets) were added on a 60, 30, 5 schedule
60 - 1 oz Northern Brewer
30 - 1 oz Saaz
5 - 1 oz Kent Goldings

At five minutes I also added the following spices
1 gr grains of paradise
19 gr indian corriander
zest of 1 orange
zest of 1/4 grapfruit

Frementation was in a 72 f room...uncontrolled.
OG at primary was 1.060 on 10/21/12
FG at secondary was 1.010 on 11/2/12
Bottling was 11/19/12


taste at secondary was very bittter with hints of grapefruit
taste at bottling was more citrus and a bit less grapefruit but still very bitter
tast three weeks later was much the same.
On 4/16/12 I grabbed a six pack of this beer and stuck it in the refrigerator thinking I would see how it was doing. To my surprise, it had improved a great deal. Much of the very bitter flavor I had been picking up had dropped out of the beer and that is really my focus here is to try to determine what caused that bitterness. I really didn't attribute it to the hops.
There were a few beers that I could not drink because of the bitterness.
Anyway, any input or thoughts would be quite welcome.

Thanks,

Ted

Did you zest the orange and grapefruit yourself? If you did, you may have gotten some of the white pithy part under the zest. This will give a bitter taste. I did this with a cream ale I did last summer where I added lime zest. So bitter in the beginning it was tough to drink. The last few bottles, several months later, mellowed out and were quite good.

You should start off with simple recipes. The recipe you have chosen is not simple and I don't think you will get much feedback.

Try looking here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/2009-hbt-bjcp-winners-recipes-141131/

or here: http://wiki.homebrewersassociation.org/BeerRecipes

webby45wr said:

Did you zest the orange and grapefruit yourself? If you did, you may have gotten some of the white pithy part under the zest. This will give a bitter taste. I did this with a cream ale I did last summer where I added lime zest. So bitter in the beginning it was tough to drink. The last few bottles, several months later, mellowed out and were quite good.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback webby45wr.
I actually brewed this recipe all grain with a friend. We made a 10 gallon batch and split it between two yeasts strains. This time around I omitted the zest. I also cut the corriander and paradise grains in half. In addition I increased some of the aroma hops and first wort hopped the bittering hops. I'm excited to try the two batches and I'll post results on this thread to share what happened on the second go round.