Oops, tannins!

So I brewed a sweet stout last night and figured I'd use my new Barley Crusher to crack the specialty grains, right? I did some searching on HBT and found that most people thought the factory setting of 0.39 thousandths was just fine.

It never crossed my mind that that applied to all-grain mashing and not extract steeping because I got way way to much grain dust and a ton of tanniny bits in the steep. I also used a new bag that didn't filter nearly enough so I had to spend about half an hour skimming husks out before I started the boil.

Anyway, I'm trying to RDWHAHB but I was curious if anyone has had luck aging out tannin flavors? It will probably stay in bottles till winter starts in earnest, and being as it's a sweet stout maybe I can adjust with more lactose (put in .5 lbs to start) to balance any astringent flavors I find at bottling?

 

i would wait until you have astringency flavors before you start tweaking. Treat the problems as they come up because for all you know there may not be astringency flavors present.

 

Usually it is temperature of steep which determine the tannins leached from the husks. Were you steeping above 170?

Also, how much steeping grains are we talking about? It takes a lot of husks to impart a noticable astringent or tannin-y quality to the beer.

When I first started brewing I went with Papazian's steep method where I added the grain and then brought it all the way to a boil and then removed the grain. Even with such an extreme I never noticed any husky quality to the beer, of course that was close to 20 years ago so my memory of the beers could be suspect.

EDIT: On rereading your post I really can not figure out why you believe you have tannins in your beer. All grain would be more at risk of tannins because of the volume of husks involved, not less. For me the rule of thumb I use for grain crush is , if the sparge doesn't stick then the grind was not too fine. I have never had any astringent quality from shredded husks and my crush produces a sizable amount of flour.

 

Astringency can be removed with gelatin.

But as yooper says, don't try to fix a problem until you know you have one.

 

Yea, I steeped at 175F. This was maybe a bit over 2 lbs of grains, so relatively not that much I suppose.

I'm not certain that I do, but there was a distinct odor that I noticed immediately. As others have advised, I'm not planning on doing anything until I see how the beer comes out, rather I was just curious how others have handled it.

 

^+1 you steeped a little high but the grain bag should have held most of the husk's when you drained it. The Husk is where tannins are produced I used to have some of the flour and a little bit of husk left in the water after steeping the grains. So any that were in there during the boil wont effect the finished product all that much.

 

Are there not enough enzymes in the specialty grains to break anything down at those temps?

 

Never heard of that one? How does that work?

 

Right, I meant at ~155. Unfortunately pretty much all the directions I've read, plus friends who homebrew have said to steep at about 170-175. I have no idea why. Noted for the future, though!

My thinking was that steeping at mash temperatures would essentially be identical to mashing, but I had not considered grain/water ratios. I guess with such a large volume of water everything floats about and can't really get down to business?

 

I find when I steep that adding the grain bag after heating the water drops it a few degrees anyway, did you monitor the temperature during the steep, or just before hand?

 

Yea I kept it @ 175 the entire time.