Has anyone using BTB, or any other gallotannin antioxidant, noticed a change in your water or beer color when using it. I’ve been using FT Blanc in my strike water for the past year, with a definite improvement in my beer.
I don’t normally prepare my strike water the night before brewing, but I wanted to save some time today so I added my salts and tannin to the kettle last night. When I took the lid off the kettle this morning, the water was deep purple in color, like watered down grape KoolAid.
I freaked out and dumped the water, then cleaned my kettle with hot water. On take two I added my salts but waited on the tannin until closer to strike temp. My strike water was clear, but I held some back to do a step mash. By the time I was boiling the remaining water, it was back to purple.
I’ve decided to let it roll and see how the beer turns out. My guess is that this is from the tannin chelating iron and/or manganese in my water and will drop out when the beer clears. I’ve noticed that my wort looks muddy/stained, but my finished beers look great. I’m guessing that this has been happening all along and I just happened to “catch it in the act” today.
Anyone else have any thoughts on what this could be? Here’s a pic I took of the water before I dumped it outside:
I get it once in a while, but seldom. For me it’s more faint pink than purple. I’ve only noticed it on the strike water, not the beer. No idea why. It was discussed on brews-bros.com maybe a year ago and the conclusion was that although weird, it didn’t make any difference to mash performance or beer color. I think someone even contacted Joe about it.
I also get a slight pink color in my mash when using BtB.
It doesn’t carry over to the beer color or the flavor, as far as I can tell.
Most recent brew using BtB was a German Pilsner.
Which I think would be a likely candidate for showing a color or taste impact.
I haven’t experienced that yet but I use all RO water, where I’m pretty sure some of you guys use well or local water (at least partially). I wonder if there’s a connection?
That’s my guess. I started using the gallotannin because I have iron and manganese in my well water and wondered if it would help deal with those in my beer. I’m wondering if this is a metal-tannin complex of some sort.
Never had a color change from using BtB.
I stopped using BtB because it seemed to have no effect on my beer quality. But then, I use only RO water that is a very consistent 12 ppm TDS (I think mostly NaCl).
Alestateyall pointed me to this thread when I sent him the below photo of the break just before the boil. The mash had the same rosey pink-ish tint. I use distilled water and add minerals per Bru’n water profiles (this was ‘Yellow Dry’).
This thread is well timed. I just encountered pink discoloration from BTB too. I also got a pink-brown deposit on some of the equipment. This hue is also visible in my silicone hoses now. (phillips bit provided for color comparison to rust, which was the first thing I worried about when I got the pink.)
The weird thing is, I have been using BTB for a while and it just started happening–using the exact same equipment and ingredients that yielded no pink before. I changed nothing.
Can anyone suggest what may have changed? Why do I get the pink now when everything should be the same?
I can think of only 2 possibilities.
My tap water changed. It’s practically RO, but I did write the water district to see if anything is different lately.
Hidden rust source in my stainless equipment (??)
How much iron do you need to get the pink complex? The only rust sources I am sure of are a couple pinhead-sized specks on my E-BIAB mash basket. If I had more rust hiding in the various basket seams I would think I would be able to see something, even just rusty water as it drips dry.
I’m really stumped!
EDIT TO ADD: In another forum I read that iron + BTB causes a GREEN precipitate, not pink. So now I don’t know what to believe!
Oh, yeah, it did me, too…for a while! After I’d used the water like that for a couple batches with no impact on the beer I decided I had better things to worry about.
One of the reasons I was worried was I thought my last beer (a very light hef) did show a slight coloration difference. It seemed a bit… muddy somehow. But that could be a misapprehension as I was confused by the pink foam and probably predisposed to find new problems. No one else has seemed to report color differences in the final product so… I am gonna try to take Denny’s advice and chill.
