Ive been making home-brew, and the last 2 batches have tasted more like wine than beer. Whats wrong?!

Question: Most of the time, I find that's caused by too little malt and/or too much adjunct sugar. A lot of the mouthfeel of beer is due to its high finished gravity (say 1.016 compared to .998 for wine). When you finish at a low gravity, your beer will feel thinner. You can fix that by using more malt and less sugar because malt will not ferment as low as sugar therefore you'll have some residual sugar helping out.
My winter ale last year was like that, but this year I added an extra pound each dry malt extract and cara-aroma malt. I also removed a pound of sugar. It came out around 7% but had great body and mouthfeel to it.

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Answers: Most of the time, I find that's caused by too little malt and/or too much adjunct sugar. A lot of the mouthfeel of beer is due to its high finished gravity (say 1.016 compared to .998 for wine). When you finish at a low gravity, your beer will feel thinner. You can fix that by using more malt and less sugar because malt will not ferment as low as sugar therefore you'll have some residual sugar helping out.
My winter ale last year was like that, but this year I added an extra pound each dry malt extract and cara-aroma malt. I also removed a pound of sugar. It came out around 7% but had great body and mouthfeel to it.

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Use less grapes :-)

Actually......

Are you adding sugar at the end for the carbonation and is that sugar properly carbonating the beer? My thoughts are that the yeast is not active and the sugar is not being converted in the last step.

What is your alcohol measurements?

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You could be fermenting at too high a temperature, which is causing an estery (fruity) flavor to develop.

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http://www.samualadams.com

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