Help troubleshoot my 2nd AG batch taste--Dry? Tannins? Not conditioned long enough?

[harpo]

I brewed my 2nd AG batch on 11-22-09. An Amber I tried to convert from an extract recipe to an 10 gallon AG batch. I am looking for help figuring out what is "missing" in the taste.

I describe it as having a "vomit" aftertaste. Not that it tastes like vomit, it has an aftertaste and smell that reminds me of the acidic taste after vomiting. (Gross, I know). I think if I were to drift away from the "vomit" nomenclature and get more technical, it lacks a "full-bodied" taste. There is definitely a malty taste, and the carb level is good. But it is very hazy, and something is amiss. My wife tells me she likes it, but might agree that something is different from what she might compare it to (Like a fat tire). From my perspective, the flavor of the Amber gets much worse after drinking my Pliny clone, which was my 1st AG batch and I would say a winner.

I am concerned that my mash temp was too low, resulting in a very dry beer. Maybe the taste and the mash temp do not have any correlation. I dunno. I have only done 3 AG batches.

Here are the specifics so that the wiser folks can pick apart what might have gone wrong.

10 gallon Amber recipe
22lbs Munich Malt (Durst)
.5 lbs Colorado 2-row
1.5 lbs British Light Crystal Crisp
1.5 Victory Malt (Briess)
2 oz Tettnang 60 min
2 oz tradition 30 min

Mashed in at 153°. Single infusion rest for 60 MIN.
After 60 minutes it was down to about 146°~147°.
Fly Sparge with 172° sparge water
~12 gallons into the boil kettle
1st runnings were ~1.045 pre-boil gravity
OG 1.051
FG 1.009 (after 1 week in primary and 1 week in secondary)

Made a 1200ml starter with 2 WLP005 British Ale vials
Oxygenated the wort with pure O2 as it was transferred to primary from the boil-chiller-oxygenation stone-fermenter chain.
Fermented at 64°-66° for both primary and secondary. Fluctuation of maybe 2°. Spent from 11-22 to 11-29 in primary, from 11-29 to 12-10 in secondary. Transferred to corny to force carb on 12-10. Tried a drink on 12-13. Taste was not to my liking, nor did it seem to taste even remotely similar to the extract version it was "copied" from.

Any ideas?

 

[david_42]

I'd agree with the excessive dryness. Your attenuation is very high and the final gravity is on the low side. It would lack the residual malt sugars that are critical for aftertaste.

It is rather young for drinking, though.

 

[malkore]

that seems like a lot of temperature loss during the mash. are you pre-heating the MLT sufficiently?

and have you calibrated your thermometer recently just to make sure you really did start the mash at 153F?

 

[harpo]

It was definitely high attenuation. This one (#2AG) and #3AG, which is a wheat in primary, both seemed to have high attenuation. The wheat went from 1.044 to 1.006 in just under a week. Too new to understand what factors caused this. Over-pitching?

Thermometers are Blichmann. Claims to be calibrated from the mfr. and ready to go. Less than 3 mos old. Boiling water in the kettle the thermometer reads 202°F. According to This calculator for boiling point of water at specific altitude and barometric pressure, that seems extremely close. It claims at my elevation and pressure, that water should boil at 202.7°F.

I do pre-heat the mash tun just before mashing in. I use hot water from the boil kettle to fill the Mash tun for a few minutes. Then I pump the water back out of the mash tun and put it back into the boil kettle. The strike water was at 162°F. I slowly add the grist and the strike water together until I have my capacity. I currently do not have much permanent insulation for the Mash Tun. Working on getting a liquid jacket around the Mash Tun (keggles, all three) to recirculate water from the HLT during the mash to keep the mash tun temperature more stable.

 

[thelastdandy]

i think the biggest thing with attenuation is the mash temp. i was always told that no matter hom much yeast you pitch, they'll only have the amount of fermentables that you give them. i personally think mashing in the high 140's probably gave you a lot of fermentables for the yeast to go after. i'm fairly new at this too, but thats always what i figured on. Someone with more experience might shoot me down on this though...

 

[harpo]

OK, so yesterdays brew went MUCH better. Started the mash at 154°, and ended the mash about 65 minutes later at 152°. I kept my mash tun inside the house the night prior to warm it up thoroughly, and filled it with 180° water and let it sit for 10 minutes just before I started.

It was an Extra Pale Ale 10 gallon batch. Pre-boil gravity was supposed to be 1.041, was about 1.040. OG at the end of the boil--shooting for 1.045, got 1.044. Pitched a 1200mL starter of WLP001. I was very happy that brew day went so well. Started just about 10AM, done with clean-up at about 4PM. Active fermentation starting (bubbles) by 4:30AM this morning about 12 hours after pitching.

Tested out my new homebrew hopback:

6" in diameter, sanke keg fittings welded to the ends with tri-clamp ends on the caps for the sanke ends.

~8" long, with a disc of perforated stainless about 2" up from the bottom. Getting the hops in was fairly easy. Getting them out took about 10 min of shaking.

4 oz of cascade leaf hops. It worked, we'll see if it worked the way it was supposed to after 3-4 weeks.

 

[ForRealBeer]

I think you hit on the solution -- you eliminated a huge delta-T by warming your MT with the 180°F water and also keeping your MY at a starting point. Nature abhors an imbalance and when you put hot liquids into a cold container, that container is almost certainly going to absorb a good amount of the heat in order to equalize. You eliminated that problem and got the result you were looking for.

As a side comment, I used to mash in a keggle and had a steep drop in temps throughout the mash period, mainly because the metal of the keggle had a lot of heat capacity and mass and therefore absorbed a lot of the warmth of the mash itself. Like you found, I found the only way to maintain temps was to preheat the keggle such that it was already close to the target mash temp.

I was pre-warming with hot water, and it with I tried several methods of insulating, but none of them were satisfactory to me because they were either kludges or ineffective, or worse, both. There were too many variables involved: first, I probably wasn't waiting long enough for the keggle temp to equilibrate, and second, and especially in the winter, there was a lot of difference in the ambient air temp and the keggle and I was losing a lot of heat that way. Those beers were good, but mashing was maddening guesswork. That's no way to be consistent, IMO.

So over the long haul, I found that rig to be too much time and work and finally I went to a round Gott cooler setup because it didn't have the same problems. Now, I warm my cooler, get my HLT to the desired temperature, strike my grains and confidently know I will be ±1.5°F of my target temp. That's a lot more fun and lets me relax and have a brew during the mash process.

 

[harpo]

Thanks for the positive feedback. It really did improve things. I agree about the keggle info and natures desire for equilibrium. I did insulate a little, and it helped.

Given this fact, I wanted to try another experiment with my keggles. There is an idea I've wanted to try for a little while now, and it may be time to get around to it. I want to weld on a jacket to the keggle. It will accommodate my thermometer and sight glass, and be ported for hot water insulation. Basically, the jacket will give approximately a 1/2" layer of hot water all the way round the main body of the keggle. I will recirculate hot water from the boil kettle (since it isn't doing anything until mash-out anyway) into the bottom fitting of the jacket and out from the top fitting. Fittings will be located 180° from each other. Temperature of the warm/hot water in the jacket will be determined after one or two sample runs. It may not be perfect in delivering equal amounts of hot water to 360° around the keggle, but hopefully it will be better than trying to use a burner underneath to bring temps up halfway through the mash.

I'm not sure if it will work, but I figure it doesn't hurt to try.

 

[Bobby_M]

I think you'd find that a traditional HERMS or RIMS system would be easier to implement than a water jacket but it looks like you're good with a TIG machine so who knows.

 

[harpo]

I think you'd find that a traditional HERMS or RIMS system would be easier to implement than a water jacket but it looks like you're good with a TIG machine so who knows.

I'm not sold on the RIMS or HERMS yet. Which basically means I haven't gotten around to building one or the other to add to the setup. I have a friend who is interested in helping me with one or the other. He used to be a process control engineer at Coors here in Golden. Not that he worked FOR Coors, just that he did process control there. I think he may have an insight or two on helping me implement the controls. I think it would be wild to have both the jacket and the HERMS or RIMS. Holy cow! Is this going to get away from me?

And yes, I can weld a little stainless...

 

[skadalajara]

If you're dead set on a water jacket, might I suggest a coil type? Weld some type of half tubing to the keggle all around.
That way, you're guarunteed to get water circulating all around and up.
Of course, it'd be a lot of work, and you'd have to be able to weld water tight.
Another idea I had was to use an IC inside and pump hot water through it instead of cold. Much less work, and if you already have an IC, free.