May be extracting tannins, should i change spacing?

Ok, so i have using the factory setting on my barley crusher and been getting 88% efficiency. I mean thats great and all but i am concerned i am extracting some tannins from the barley husks, I feel like im getting a really shape bitterness from getting such a high efficiency that i can slightly taste on the back of my tongue with a majority of my beers. Does this sounds possible? If so what spacing would you guys recommend to get down to at least 80%?

I am going to take a guess that you are fly sparging. With that, I'll take another guess that it is a slow fly sparge.

I say that because I now have my BC back at factory setting, but I finish my sparge in about 30 minutes (instead of the often published 60 minutes), and I was able to get my efficiency down to 75-77%.

I was having the same problem of too much efficiency (85-88%) but I was overcrushing the grain (with a tightened down BC) and sparging too slow. If I am on the right track, speed things up a bit, and you will be able to drop your efficiency.

The other guess is that you are completely draining your mash tun to hit your preboil volume. I think this will have less effect then the sparge speed, but by starting with more sparge water than the calculations call for, you can avoid draining every last bit of runnings from your tun, and hopefully, leave behind more of that low quality wort.

I also want to point out what a funny problem this is, because 99% of the threads along these lines are about increasing efficiency. That said, you will see an improved wort quality if you can get down to the mid 70's.

Joe

Does you wort look cloudy going into the boil kettle? If so, I would vorlauf to make the wort clearer before you boil it. I had a similar problem a while ago, and traced it back to too much draff (bits of grain) getting into the boil kettle.

I did one batch where I vorlaufed until it was crystal clear, and one until it was mostly clear. The mostly clear batch actually tasted a little better than the crystal clear batch, so you don't have to go crazy with the vorlauf, just enough to filter out most of the draff.

I had the same issue with a pale ale recipe that I brewed a month ago, the wort had a very grainy taste and was astringent as well. Now I mash for an hour and fly sparge for 30 minutes to fill my boil pot. I take a hydrometer reading to make sure I was above my 1.010 self proclaimed cutoff after I'm done lautering.

I take samples during the lauter and taste them to see if they are still sweet and I also make sure my sparge water is at 168F or slightly below and I've had no issues with the past 4 all grain batches.

I would look more towards the pH of your mash and your water chemistry before worrying about the crush. I don't remember exactly what my BC is set to at the moment, but I get a good bit of flour out of mine. My efficiency is in the mid-eighties and haven't had any of the issues you are describing.

bull8042 said:

I would look more towards the pH of your mash and your water chemistry before worrying about the crush. I don't remember exactly what my BC is set to at the moment, but I get a good bit of flour out of mine. My efficiency is in the mid-eighties and haven't had any of the issues you are describing.

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That's what I was thinking It could that "sharp bitterness" has more to do with water chemistry than with the crush.

Yooper said:

That's what I was thinking It could that "sharp bitterness" has more to do with water chemistry than with the crush.

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Could you elaborate some more on that? What ions in particular cause that?

I agree on the possibility of it being the water. You said you notice it in the majority of your brews, which styles do you notice it in?

Nateo said:

Could you elaborate some more on that? What ions in particular cause that?

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Sodium and sulfates, in particular, can make a beer very harsh. I brewed a Kolsch several years back (before I paid attention to silly things like water chemistry) wherein I used softened water. That was the harshest, most bitter beer I've ever tasted, and there were next to no hops in it!

Now I find it ironic that I (a chemist) ignored the water chemsitry...

Anyways, John Palmer's guides are good sources on water chemistry. Sodium and sulfate are your culprits.

Dimerizer said:

Sodium and sulfates, in particular, can make a beer very harsh. I brewed a Kolsch several years back (before I paid attention to silly things like water chemistry) wherein I used softened water. That was the harshest, most bitter beer I've ever tasted, and there were next to no hops in it!

Now I find it ironic that I (a chemist) ignored the water chemsitry...

Anyways, John Palmer's guides are good sources on water chemistry. Sodium and sulfate are your culprits.

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In my case, I have a very high bicarbonate level. That gives lighter colored beers a terrible harshness, very sharp. I made a kolsch a few years ago without any adjustments, and it was sharp and harsh compared to now.

But yes, sulfates can cause this too. I've seen quite a few recipes calling for "1 tsp gypsum". If I did that, my tongue would burn from the harshness!

I'd try something simple to see if the water is an issue. Buy RO water, just this once. Use a few grams of calcium chloride following the "beginner's water primer" but nothing else. Brew the beer with the same crush, same techniques, etc. If that fixes it, it was the water. If not, it is something else. But in my experience, a harsh astringency tends to be water related if decent technique is used.

Yooper said:

In my case, I have a very high bicarbonate level. That gives lighter colored beers a terrible harshness, very sharp. I made a kolsch a few years ago without any adjustments, and it was sharp and harsh compared to now.

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Same here - my local water is terribly hard. I used to get terrible harshness out of my american pale ales before I started to concern myself with water chemistry. It had never really been an issue before as I was sticking to darker beers.

I ended up having to dilute with distilled and bring some of the minerals back with additives. Fixed the problem immediately.

Thanks for all the responses guy, been working 80 hour weeks so havent had much time to read all the input. Note on the hard water my water is softened.

I had a problem with this a while back and it was from over-sparging. I hit high 80's (efficiency) on a couple beers and didn't watch the gravity of my final runnings. Now I monitor the gravity at the end of my sparge and cut it off at 1.012, I'm a little paranoid about tannins. Using a refractometer makes this much easier because you get a nearly instant read.
Also if the pH of your final runnings comes up too far you can extract tannins. This rise in pH usually coincides with a drop in gravity. I would recommend you not change your barley crusher settings, brew as usual but throw out the last .5-1G of runoff and top off your kettle with water. You should still get efficiency in the high 70's-low 80's without the tannins.

BrewAlchemy said:

Thanks for all the responses guy, been working 80 hour weeks so havent had much time to read all the input. Note on the hard water my water is softened.

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You don't want to use softened water for brewing. Ion exchangers replace Ca (good) and Mg (too much is bad, but you need a very small amount) with Na (bad in large amounts). Water softener don't do anything to the bicarbonates. You have just as much bicarbonate as post-softening as pre-softening.

If you have a lot of bicarbonate (CO3) in your water, which you probably do if you're using a softener, the softener is making NaHCO3, commonly known as sodium carbonate, or baking soda.

Large amounts of baking soda could give your beer an unusual harshness.

I'd say the water softener is more likely your culprit than tannins.

What would you recommend to add to the water?

the softener is probably causing your water to be very high in sodium

You can send a sample to ward labs $16 AND FIND OUT EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON

you may end up needing RO or spring water

BrewAlchemy said:

What would you recommend to add to the water?

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The issue is having "too much" stuff in your water. Adding anything won't make it better. The simplest thing to do would be to dilute it with RO or distilled, although if your water is really hard, you'd probably be diluting at a 10-to-1 RO-to-tap ratio, and at that point, why not just use RO water?

I agree with sending your water in for testing. I would test the non-softened water. That will tell you exactly what's going on.

BrewAlchemy said:

What would you recommend to add to the water?

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+1 on not using softened water. That was my issue. I used my city's water report and Palmer's water chemistry spreadsheet to calculate that I needed to dilute 1:1 with distilled/RO to bring my carbonates down to a reasonable level and then I bring a few salts back up using baking soda, gypsum, and calcium chloride.

It cured my harshness/bitterness problems immediately. If you've never looked at your water chemistry before, I highly suggest it.