In our continuing series of making off-flavor beer, we put together another experiment to learn more about the Astringent issue that can occur in your beer. Mike has seen this flaw marked off on a few of his scoresheets from competitions, but never fully understood the problem. In this video, we explore the topic of astringency in beer and how much effort it took Mike to get this off-flavor to present in the beer.

How Bad Was It?

In comparison to the metallic off-flavor, it wasn’t too too bad. I had a hard time putting words to the off-flavor although my involuntary physical reaction to it was telling. Mike’s doctored beer forced my mouth to pucker. It was in the same vein as something sour without the acidic taste. The reaction was strong but not as unpleasant as other off-flavors like light struck beer.

The fascinating past about this experiment was the amount of effort that Mike had to put into it for the desired taste to appear in the doctored beer. When you have to add tea to the beer, then you have thoughts about how common a problem this off-flavor is in beer.

We have been told that too much hot water contact with grain hulls can cause your beer to have an astringent quality to it. The thing is, we’ve mashed overnight and there were no indications of this off-flavor in that beer. That cream ale was extremely clean tasting.

Overall, even though it was productive to learn more about this off-flavor, we wonder how often we’ll come across it in the wild,

Brew ON!