Since I'm not in the habit of someone calling me or my brethren the boogeyman, I got up this morning, inspected by East Coast IPA fermenting away, and grabbed the bible or Homebrew scripture if you prefer.
It's not often I have to go Papazian on someone but here is goes.
Page 31 of The Home Brewer's Companion/The Essential Handbook under the sub-heading
"Using specialty malts without Mashing"
and I quote => For the ideal extraction of the favorable qualities of any malt, the crushed grain should never be brought to a boil. Some recipes and procedures guide beginning brewers to bring the specialty malts just to a boil and quickly remove them from the heat source. This is a simple procedure designed to encourage their use by beginning brewers. For those who desire to improve the quality of their beers with a small additional investment in time and attention, the grains should NEVER be steeped in water who temperature exceeds 170 degrees F (77 degrees C). The extraction of UNDESIRABLE TANNIN and ASTRINGENT characters is minimized with a lower-temperature steep" end quote
Let's remember one thing here, professional brewing in big vessels and homebrewing are two different things.
Have fun brewing and open a beer and enjoy!
I think you completely missed my point. The point being that the bolded part of your quote, despite being written in a 10-30 year old book (depending on edition), is nice in
theory but may not be the case in practice.
Even before you "went Papazian" on me (?) I was well aware of what ol' Charlie had said, as well as many other sources of the same information. Thus calling the tannin thing a "boogeyman" (yeah, I was calling the tannins boogeymen, not you and your buddies).
IMPE, I have yet to extract tannins from steeping grains. I've steeped for well over 30 mins. I've steeped well over 170. I've steeped in way "too much" (according to the myths) water. I've steeped in far "too little" water. I've steeped in tap water (quite hard and alkaline here). I've steeped with distilled or r/o water. Get the point yet? Regardless of what a book may have said, in practice, I say it's not bloody likely.
Conversely, and stop me if I said this before
, in my all grain brews I check mash pH to ensure it's under ~6 (since a pH much higher can extract tannins). One time, I had a high pH (~6.7, 6.8, something like that), and
coincidentally, that was the one batch I made that had tannins. My temps and volumes were pretty much spot on in that batch, it was a beer I've made before, and the ingredients came from the same source. The one variable that was different was the high pH.
I, too, learned a lot from Charlie P's book. But one of the things I've also learned is that a lot of the things that guys like Papazian and Palmer said back in the day have since been proven wrong in practice. Palmer continues to update (and omit things from) How to Brew, and himself has admitted that some of the information in that first issue (the online one everyone swears by) is quite dated. Thanks for "going Papazian", because that was exactly my point in my earlier post; Just because someone said it (many years ago in this case), doesn't make it the case in practice.
Brew strong and trust in your experience young grasshopper!
