Brew Dudes

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!

From time to time, Mike likes to torture me. It starts off with a nice invitation to have a beer in a socially distant environment and it ends up with me tasting some of the worst beer I have ever encountered. We are producing these posts/videos as a part of our Beer Off-Flavor Series.

How Bad Was It?

As we discussed in the video, I don’t think we have encountered this off-flavor before in any of the beer we have tasted in our lives, may it be from a commercial brewery or a home brewery.

Mike treated one glass with ferrous sulphate and it made the beer cloudy. After a few tastes, my mouth was coated with the stuff. It really made the beer experience unpleasant. Not that I am proud of it, but I do have experience with tasting pennies. If I were to put one descriptor in front of you to understand the off-flavor, it would be the copper coin-like.

The off-flavor lingered for a while after tasting it. I would say at this level, it would be pretty difficult to miss. I think where this off-flavor would manifest itself even at a subtle level would be in the aftertaste. If there a bit of metal “taste” (it’s almost more of a reaction happening in your mouth) during the aftertaste, then you’ll know that your beer has this issue.

If you encounter this off-flavor in your brew, it most likely is coming from your water. Metallic compounds are in your water that are affecting your beer. You will need to switch your water source for your next beer to rectify the situation.

I hope to never taste this off-flavor again.

Brew ON!

Have you ever wondered about the “No Chill” method of brewing beer where you don’t quickly chill the wort after the boil to fermentation temperatures? Rather, the no chill method calls for transferring your kettle to a cooler environment and letting the wort chill itself via ambient temperatures before racking to a fermentor and pitching yeast. We ran an experiment where we brewed the same beer twice and chilled one beer rapidly and let the other “chill” overnight. Just to make things more interesting, we brewed with Sabro LUPOMAX hop pellets in a one gallon, Single Malt and Single Hops beer format. Check out the results of this Chill vs. No Chill SMaSH showdown!

The Brewing Process

Like I wrote above, we brewed the same beer twice but with just one little difference – how the wort was chilled. Here are the details for both beers:

Grains – 2 pounds (.9 kgs) of Rahr Standard 2-Row malt

Hops – 1 ounce (28 g) of LUPOMAX Sabro hops

Instructions – Heated 2 gallons (7.6 L) of tap water treated with a little sliver of a Campden tablet to 150°F (66°C). Mashed grain in a bag in a cooler for 1 hour. Transferred wort to kettle and boiled for 1 hour. Hops were added during these parts of the process.

0.25 ounces (7 g) at 15 minutes to go in the boil

0.5 ounces (14 g) at 0 minutes to go in the boil (Flameout)

0.25 ounces (7 g) at day 3 of fermentation

Fermented at 68°F (20°C) for 10 days using Fermentis US-05 (4 g). Racked beer to keg and carbonated to 2.5 volumes.

The Triangle Test Results

I tasted both beers and found them to be quite similar. The whole reason for this experiment was to prove that the No Chill method did not affect beer flavor in a noticeable way. Mike concentrated with all of his might and found the one that was different between the three cups presented to him.

If we’re splitting hairs, the beer where the quick chill process was employed we perceived to be smoother than the no chill beer. Mike said that if we didn’t have the beer to compare side by side, we wouldn’t have made that conclusion.

As I write this post, I wonder if we should have been comparing two beers where clarity would have been important. I think that where the chill method would have been easy to pick out from the no chill beer, and it would have been preferable.

Overall, I think the No Chill method is one that you can use in your own homebrewing practices. In terms of flavor for a hop forward beer, there wasn’t any drawbacks to the No Chill beer. You should experiment with the method if you’re looking not to use as much water in your brewing or just want to take time to sleep while your beer chills.

Besides the experiment, these beers were very enjoyable because of the hops. The Sabro LUPOMAX were awesome with lots of tropical fruit and peach! It was a good choice for a SMaSH.

Thanks for reading. BREW ON!