What is my best bet to reduce tannins?

Currently I mill my own grain with a Corona style mill. I do a double batch sparge after a 60 minute mash. I'm hitting around 80% efficiency, but I feel I'm starting to get a tannin quality in my beer.

So, should I try to increase the gap on the mill and not go so fine?

Try conditioning the malt?

Go to a single batch sparge?

BTW, I am not using overly hot water to sparge. My grainbed never gets out of the 160s.

kansasbrew said:

Currently I mill my own grain with a Corona style mill. I do a double batch sparge after a 60 minute mash. I'm hitting around 80% efficiency, but I feel I'm starting to get a tannin quality in my beer.

So, should I try to increase the gap on the mill and not go so fine?

Try conditioning the malt?

Go to a single batch sparge?

BTW, I am not using overly hot water to sparge. My grainbed never gets out of the 160s.

Click to expand...

Yes.
Yes
and maybe yes.

The first thing I would do is consider the water, though. Has your water supply possibly changed? Often a husky astrigency isn't from the grains at all, but from a high level of alkalinity, and more often in lighter colored beers.

However, malt conditioning is a great idea! It can help keep your husks more intact. You can try making the gap a bit wider- you want to crush the grain but not pulverise the husks. The single batch sparge to me is "meh" as far as making changes in the flavor of the beer. Can hurt, but I can't see where it'll improve any astrigency.

Thanks for the quick response. Yes, my water has high alkalinity. When I brewed today, I dialed that down a lot by dilution. Sure hope that does the trick. If not, I guess I'm looking at my crush.

kansasbrew said:

Thanks for the quick response. Yes, my water has high alkalinity. When I brewed today, I dialed that down a lot by dilution. Sure hope that does the trick. If not, I guess I'm looking at my crush.

Click to expand...

Dilution should fix it! I do a dilution of 50/50% of RO and my tap water and add a few salts to further reduce the mash pH. It makes a HUGE difference, especially in lighter colored beers.

Mineral salt additions in the sparge water do NOT significantly reduce the pH. The primary approach with sparging water is to reduce its alkalinity. pH is just an indirect indicator of water alkalinity. Dilution with low alkalinity water such as RO or DI is also a good approach.

a PH above 6 will extract some tannin especially with a double sparge as the PH will increase

Multiple sparging and collecting thin runnings will increase tannins too

Take a gravity reading of your 2nd batch sparge. 1.010 is the typical minimum gravity you want to see. My last batch was og 1.044, and my second batch sparge was 1.012. This is a relatively low gravity beer, and I sparged enough for a 90 minute boil, so generally speaking you should be ok with a double batch sparge. I also use 5.2 in my mash but don't treat sparge water.

If you are worried just get a coarser crush, and use one sparge step and just stay with more grain and lower efficiency

I've have just tried my first batch of all grain. I noticed a taste that I got in some of my partial mash batches. When I hear the word tannin it makes me think of that taste. Not sure if it's what I am tasting or not. However, I am looking to rid the taste from my beer. The all grain I just made is a Milk Stout. At first it goes down great and silky on the tongue. Once it goes down the hatch the after taste is a weird off off flavor. Like I said, I have had this problem before and would love to identify it. Any guesses to what it is?