American brown ale BIAB came out very astringent

I did a batch of Am. brown, a Moose Drool clone, and tasted a bottle of it today. It has a pronounced astringency to it. The desired flavors are there, but the astringency is front and center. I used a recipe I spotted on BrewToad.

My brew:

11lbs M.O., 1.5lbs crystal 80, 6oz. choc. malt, 1oz. black malt. I crush my own grains in a MM-2, at a gap of 0.039. The crush looked good, with the hulls intact. Six gallons strike water, mashed at 152F, 60 min. sacc. rest (came out 150F after 60 mins.). Did a pour-over sparge with 2 gallons of 165F water, to bring the kettle volume to near 7 gallons. I used bottled spring water (Ice Mountain), no added salts. I did not measure pH at any point; I have no paper or a meter.

For the boil: 1oz. EKG at 60 mins., 1oz. Willamette at 15, and 1oz. Liberty at flameout. Also added a whirlfloc and 1/2 tsp. Wyeast nutrient at 15 mins.

Had a lot of boiloff (my 10 gal. kettle is wider than tall). Post-boil volume was just over 4.5 gal. and I added bottled water to bring it up to 5.5. Chilled down to 68F in about 20 mins., and racked to a 6.5 gal. glass carboy. Gravity was 1.064.

Oxygenated 60 secs. with pure O2 through a 2-micron stone. Pitched 1.8L starter of WLP002, and added a blowoff tube.

Fermentation was rocking within a few hours, but never to the point it came out the blowoff tube. Nice, 1" layer of kreusen. Temps ran away, up to 76F for the first 12 hours or so (I didn't have a swamper--I do now), then back down to around 70. By the second day it was in the mid-high 60s, where it remained during the rest of the primary.

Kept in primary 1 month, then bottled. F.G. was 1.016. Sample I tasted seemed OK. I stored the bottles at around 70F. Yesterday I put one in the fridge to cold-crash overnight, after 3 weeks in the bottle. Opened it today--carbonation was good, color looked great, and it had a decent, 1/2" head in the glass.

I know there are a bunch of things that can cause astringency: too high mash pH, too hot/too much sparge water, bad crush (shredded husks), etc.

I know I had a few screwups while making this batch. Does anything stand out in my process that may be the most likely culprit? Any thoughts would be helpful.

I plan to let it condition a few more weeks and try another bottle. I'm not giving up on the beer yet.

Do not give up on the beer....there is a thread started by Revvy somewhere on here about letting your beer sit in bottles for weeks if not months and most problems just seem to go away.

Your fermentation temps were too high but it sounds like you have a plan in place for that going forward. I'm not sure that would cause your astringency issue but it might. As said above, don't give up on it. I have personally witness a beer I thought was undrinkable fix itself after a 6mo cellar. Pack it away cool corner of your basement and check back every 2 months. At some point you will be pleasantly surprised.

It probably is the sparging and/or over sparging. Tap and bottle water can be like ~7 pH and it's never a good idea to squeeze the bag after a sparge, if that's the case, even though your water was under 170 F. Probably is tannins.

Looks like you could have done a pure BIAB, without sparging and you have the opportunity to do a mash out at 170 F. You can squeeze the bag under this condition. It's best not to sparge at all, and just add your top up water before the boil.

So, I say, why sparge with BIAB?

My question to the OP is are your sure it's astringency that you're detecting and not something else? Maybe the presence of fusels due to the high fermentation temp? Nothing you described about your process would lead me to focus on tannins.

Have a look at this thread and see if it might better describe what you may be tasting...

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/what-causes-astringent-taste-15094/

I agree with with LLBJ, get you get a headache?

I don't doubt that there are some fusels present, due to my excessive ferm temps. But the primary off-flavor I am getting is more of the tea bag or bite-an-aspirin taste. Bitter, in a bad way. It made my mouth pucker a bit.

I didn't drink enough to get a headache. A few sips and that was all.

I sparged about 2 gallons, and wonder if the runnings were getting thin and leaching tannins. After the sparge I squeezed the bag like it owed me money. I know there is some disagreement as to whether that is a good idea or not. I'm thinking from this point forward, I should keep it simple and do no-sparge BIAB, and only a gentle squeeze of the bag.

I will leave this beer alone for a while and taste-test a bottle every couple weeks or so. Maybe more conditioning will clean it up a bit.

It's not a drain-pour yet.

You can definitely squeeze the bag, even at mash out temps., no doubt about that one. The pH is around ~5.3 ish (if all is well).

Squeeze, squeeze and squeeze.

We're there any grains in the boil?

Also, how high a boil are you running that you boil off that much in 60mins? That seems excessive...

MaxStout said:

After the sparge I squeezed the bag like it owed me money. I know there is some disagreement as to whether that is a good idea or not. I'm thinking from this point forward, I should keep it simple and do no-sparge BIAB, and only a gentle squeeze of the bag.

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There may (still) be disagreement on squeezing, but those who think it releases tannins are the homebrew equivalent of the flat-earth society.

There is no reason to avoid squeezing the bag.

I have a recipe for American Brown Ale that had the following grains:

11 lbs Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM) 84.6 %
1 lbs 8.0 oz Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (60.0 SRM) 11.5 %
8.0 oz Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM) 3.8%

Interesting that in Beersmith, your grain bill comes out at 22.6 SRM, mine comes out at 23.4 (which I think is almost indistinguishable). After a couple weeks in the bottle I detected what I thought was astringency (my palate is unsophisticated). Almost like an unpleasant bitterness from the wrong kind or timing of hops.

After sitting another few weeks, the flavors really came together and it was a very popular beer. Still a bit hoppy, but with a nice smooth subtle roasty/caramel flavor.

The short of the long is I'll repeat what others have said: definitely give it some time.

Carlscan26 said:

We're there any grains in the boil?

Also, how high a boil are you running that you boil off that much in 60mins? That seems excessive...

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I don't recall seeing any grains in the boil, but maybe a few pieces of hull found their way out of the bag.

I had a good rolling boil throughout, but maybe I could ratchet the heat down a bit to a more gentle boil. My kettle is 16"w x 12"d, so 2+ gallons boil off isn't unusual.

MaxStout said:

I don't recall seeing any grains in the boil, but maybe a few pieces of hull found their way out of the bag.

I had a good rolling boil throughout, but maybe I could ratchet the heat down a bit to a more gentle boil. My kettle is 16"w x 12"d, so 2+ gallons boil off isn't unusual.

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My kettle is pretty wide too: 15 gal MoreBeer kettle which is 14" high and 18" in diameter and I get about 1.5 gals of boil off in a 60 min boil with a good rolling boil. So I'd agree that you can ratchet down a bit.

I wouldn't think a 2 gallon sparge would lead to tannin extraction, but I suppose stranger things have happened. I personally do a 1 to 2 gallon pour-over-grains sparge with every batch. I first did it due to mash volume limitations from my 8g kettle, but found that efficiency went up by 5 full points by doing it. Additionally, when I was doing full-volume mashes, my efficiency was more sporadic and hard to predict, especially as the recipe OG increased. By doing a sparge, I found that regardless of OG, my numbers were more reliably achieved. I currently set all recipes in BeerSmith to 85% efficiency and I rarely miss, though overshooting by a couple points is pretty common. As a result of all of this, a sparge has become SOP for me.

A few things that I've discovered with sparging BIAB:

1) 1 gallon works every bid as effectively as 2 gallons. If I have the volume to spare, I'll do a gallon and if I need more, then it'll be 2 gallons. It just depends on the recipe and batch size.
2) Water temp is not important. Cold water straight from the tap works equally as well as 168° water. The added bonus of using cold water is that it cools the grains making squeezing the bag much less troublesome (and we all know how much fun squeezing a hot bag of grain can be [/sarc]). And, I squeeze out every last drop. I've done close to 40 batches in total, the last 15 or so have been with a sparge and I've never once had astringency issues.
3) When sparging, no mash-out is needed. I've done it both ways and have found no perceivable benefit to the mash-out. If mashing full-volume then yes, it'll get you a couple more points, but if sparging, it's a waste of time.

Is this beer possibly overcarbed. I had a brown ale the got overcarbed and was told it was astringency. Try degassing a sample a little.

All you bag squeezers, if you can w/your setup try using two coffee cups to press down on the grain bag. You can put all your weight into the press if you put your bag in a collendar over your mashtun and place the whole thing on the floor. I do it very well and don't burn my hands, but I'm only talking bout maybe 5 lbs of grain setting over a 5 gallon collman cooler.

Followup:

After coming home from a much-needed 2-week vacation, I decided to give the ale another shot. I put one in the fridge for 24 hours, and tried it today. Still has the same bite to it, though maybe a little less so. Still, it's hard to choke down a 12 oz. glass. I did my usual pour into a pint glass and let it set a few minutes before sampling.

It may be astringency...or maybe it's oxidation. My palate isn't trained well enough to really distinguish. The beer seems to give that "biting an aspirin tablet" zing, with a bad, stale metallic aftertaste. Maybe it's the "wet cardboard" oxidized flavor, I just can't be sure. I might have a friend (and more experienced brewer) give it a try and get his opinion.

I'm still not giving up on it. I put the 2 cases away in a closet and I'll "forget" about them for a few months. Maybe crack one open on Halloween.

That grain bill with water that has a low residual alkalinity could be the culprit. The acidity from the malts could have brought your ph too low and that will cause the beer to have a sharpness. I know this to be true because it has happened to me before and I fixed it by fixing my water. Since you didn't measure your ph we can't say for sure that this was the cause, but you probably should look into the effect that water with low residual alkalinity has on beers with roasted malts.

Bad malt? Years ago I had several batches of beer that had an almost burnt astringency to them. Turned out that I was using an old bag of uncrushed 60L crystal that must have gone bag (i.e. oxidized, moisture, ???). Switched to fresh 60L and all of my problems went away. Probably not something you can pinpoint, but if you're storing adjuncts, you might want to pop a handful in your mouth, smell it, and otherwise make sure it seems fresh. Just a thought. There's nothing more frustrating then having an off-putting flavor and having no idea why.

Good luck!
P