Astringent Ale Syndrome

[jt]

Ok, I've had some problems with astringent ales (as mentioned on the old forum)
I thought I was either
a) reciurculating badly
b) crushing too fast
c) splashing badly from the runnoff to the kettle
d) combinations of all the above

But I think I've fixed all those
The common thread is that the only affected beers have had Aussie Pale as the predominant malt (with <10% Vienna, wheat or caramalt per batch)
Beers with darker malts don't suffer at all. Beers with MO don't suffer either.

So I think that leaves me with wort ph

I had a quick look at promash along with the Wellington water specs and it looks like I could be making lots of various additions depending on the target water spec.

But before I rush off to the chemists- or invest in a ph meter, has anyone else in Welly suffered the same ?

I'd have bought some gypsum from Phil, but someone had just bought his last 4 packets

There was a suggestion from Stu about tartaric acid - Steve Nally uses 50gm per 1000 litres which would put me about 1.5gm for 30 litres

Does anyone have a rule of thumb for additions in Welly perhaps - or should I go the whole hog and test ?

[Horace]

Lower attenuation ( although Cali common isn't usually that low) and higher dextrin levels - lower mash temp. may reduce the perception of astringency.

Calcium in the mash will help reduce the extraction of tannins, high levels of bicarb will promote extraction. I'm not sure if that is a pH thing or an ionic factor

Checking theremometers is possibly a good idea - I have often wondered how reliable they can be. At the moment I have three that are identical but all read different temps by 1 or 2 degrees. They cost enough so I thought they should be good.

[Sparky]

"Checking theremometers is possibly a good idea - I have often wondered how reliable they can be. At the moment I have three that are identical but all read different temps by 1 or 2 degrees. They cost enough so I thought they should be good."

Yep seen that myself in a lab Horace. The excercise was to grab a handful of thermometers and compare the readings. The error between my pickings spanned 3 degrees.

An error can be expected with most thermometers, so it pays to consider at least + or - minus 1-2 degrees. You can get a rough idea of the accuracy by inserting the thermometer into an ice slurry. It should read 0 deg.

[Nick]

Astringency can be any number of things from excess tannins from over sparging, to a lactic bug in your brewing environment.

If the beer is brewing out dry then some people perceive this as astringent.

It might be the malt. It can harbour moulds and such that although they're killed during the boil, they produce chemical by products that survive and impart astringent flavours.

Are you using freshly crushed malt? Rancid or stale malts cause astringent flavours.

Are you filtering out the chlorine from your brewing water?

Are you separating out the protein breaks from your brew?

Are you racking the beer off the yeast soon enough after fermentation? Autolysis is perceived as astringency by some people. 

Maybe it's the yeast itself.

[Stu H]

Ow good thread, I've been having trouble with weird tasting astringent pale ales recently... Also a kind of yucky malty flavour I thought was from the crystal I've been using, but I don't think it is... This is good food for thought.

I've been thinking maybe it's to do with:

maybe my fermentor buckets are a bit old/tired?

mashing too thick - strike temp being too high?

something weird with pH - I do water additions but can't monitor pH?

problems re-using yeast?

Probably getting more than one problem mixed up as one though!

[jt]

It's surprising what resurfaces...

I can't recall what I did - probably lifted my santiation, could have worked through liquor volumes. Certainly didn't get to testing ph

But every once in a while I get a series of background off flavours, nothing too bad, annoying.
Put down to a change in wellington water supply or maybe aged, but not expired 05 (which cops a bit of flak from time to time)

[Nick]

It's spring in NZ so all the wild yeasts are out and about looking for a new home...

I'd switch to glass from plastic. It makes a huge difference. You can sanitize with bleach and the finished product is so much better tasting.

Re-using yeast can cause some funky flavours depending on how many generations you let the strain develop for. 

I read somewhere that you can get away with about 3 in a home environment but I personally never risked the time, effort, and money that goes into a brew with my own strain.

[Sam]

I've had the same issue in Wellington. Some beers are astringent, whilst others are not. It could be brewing beers on the far end of light/dark. I thought temperature for a while but I've recently double checked my temp sensors, and they are all good. I want to pinpoint it on sparging, and the eventual pH (possibly from over sparging?), but I'll experiment a bit and see what I get.

When I changed my water supply to river water from the Tararuas the problems went away. The river water has a very low mineral count. I tried an IPA on that water with no additions, and it was very flat, had very little bitterness (to be expected I guess). No astringency at all though. Various belgians, and porters on the same river water with minor additions were all very good.

I recently came back to using Wellington water, and hit the astringent issue on the first brew. I didn't have any additions around so I used the water straight from the tap, and brewed a single hop APA. It turned out with a very puckering astringent flavour which was too much so I binned it before bottling. A couple of weeks before I did an extract based IPA, which turned out to be absolutely delicious, which is disappointing because it disappeared in no time at all. So I know it's likely not the yeast, or fermentation. I put it down to the mash.

I've just done another APA-ish beer, and I took it easy on the sparge, left a lot behind - hopefully this helps. Still no additions in that one though. Next I think I'll take Stu M's advice from 2008 and try a bit of CaSo4 for lighter beers.

[Nick]

Do you filter the water?

A permaculturist I was listening to recently put it very nicely and he said something like this:

What do they put chlorine in water for? To kill bugs right? So Chlorine kills living things. 

And so what happens when you water your garden with city water? The Chlorine kills off millions of microbes in the soil that are essential for the correct biodynamic balance needed to grow vegetable properly. The dead microbes then spew toxins as they decompose and the soil gets even more out of whack...

The same goes for beer. As we're all well aware, beer is a complex interaction of enzymes, yeasts, microbes and all sorts of living things.

[Hutch]

For beer making choline isn't always a bad thing. Although in high levels it can lead to 'off' flavours, the tap water levels in NZ are pretty low. For example Palmerston North tap water has lower chlorine levels than the ground water in most of Germany. 

I'm not saying that Chlorine isn't the problem, but if lots of Wellingtonians are brewing perfectly fine beer with tap water, I'd be looking somewhere else first.

[jt]

Funny you mention that Sam.
I never did try any water treatment and anyway the problem disapeared
But I read back over the thread last week and read that post about CaSo4 and wondered if I'd give it a go
So I'm repeating the last pale I brewed tomorrow with a tsp of CaSo4, comparison in a few weeks ....

[MrC]

I had some astringency issues a little while back and after a lot of research and experimentation I put it down to the Sulphate : Chloride ratio.

 

I was adding CaS04 to my beers without adding any Chloride to balance it and ended up with astringent beers (albeit only slightly).  Brewing salt calculators like this will show you a Sulphate : Chloride ratio and if it says highly bitter then it will likely be astringent.

 

My beers are no longer astringent :)

[jt]

Nice link Mr Cherry, might check Welly water plus a cas04 addition to see how much I might be puckering up!