I brewed my first beer by BIAB method last month.
But I felt grain-like bitterness, probably derived from malt, and it was little bit unconformable for me.
What are possible causes for that kind of flavor?
Dark roast malts will taste bitter, especially if used to excess.
Another flavor that is confused with bitterness is from tannins. It is more like biting grape skin and less like bitterness.
Knowing more about your recipe and process would help answer the question.
Thank you for your reply, jeffy and rburrelli!
Sorry, my expression was not quite right.
It’s difficult to express precisely, but it was unintended and little bit unpleasant crispiness, probably derived from malt.
I wanted to brew hop-forward American Pale ale.
I’d like to write a summary of my recipe and ingredients in another reply.
I agree with Jeffy, it sounds to me like you could be getting tannins.
Check your mash pH – keep it below about 5.8 if you are doing any kind of sparge (ie, rinsing off that massive BIAB grain bag to get more sugars out). Your mash should normally be down at 5.1-5.3, but it will naturally rise during sparging. If you are doing the BIAB in your whole volume, ensure you keep that pH down, or you are sure to extract tannins.
Its also possible if your mill is shredding the hell out of the grain husks, but this is unlikely with a decent mill nowadays.
Ingredients and a process is as below.
Ingredients
malt; pale malt(73%), crystal malt (7%), wheat malt(20%)
hop; Citra 23.7g
yeast; English Ale yeast 2g
Brewing method
3L BIAB
Brewing process
mash at 67 - 70℃ for 60min
boil without adding hops for 60min
add hop 15min after boiling, cover and wait for 15min
cool in an iced water until it gets about 30℃
transfer liquid to fermentator
add yeast, wait for 10min, shake it, wait for 10min, shake it
fermentation at 18℃-22℃ for 2 weeks
add sanitized priming sugar 22ml (21g glucose/300ml water)
second fermentation in a bottle for 2 weeks
Thank you for your reply.
I did squeeze a grain bag by hand instead of rinsing, but pH was below 5.0 at the beginning of boil process.
But very helpful information for me.
When you say “grain like bitterness” I think of herbstoff aka grain bitterness which is caused by oxidation.
i know what it tastes like these days. Often pick it out in locally brewed German beers, Kolsch and Pils for example.
My wife, who has a great palate, seems to be blind to it.
I missed it as well for a great portion of my beer drinking life, just assuming it was some sort of hop derived bitter flavor. Now that I know what it is, makes it really hard to ignore. Maybe one would be better off not knowing/tasting it was there.
Damn. Now I gotta figure out exactly what this herbstoff thing is.
Like when I learned what THP tastes like. That grainy cheerios flavor that I thought complimented the graininess? Drinking (some) sours isn’t quite the same any more.
It’s from HSA. So its literally in every beer that isn’t brewing in a low oxygen brewhouse. It will not be in European Macro brews.
I also BIAB and have been struggling with this grainy flavor as well and have been trying (unsuccessfully as of yet) to pinpoint the cause. Along the way I’ve begun building starters, I now ferment with temp control, bought an RO filter and have learned basic water chemistry, and recently began monitoring pH but the taste is still there. My next move is to open up the gap in my mill just a bit to see if my current (tightest) setting is creating excessive husk particulate. Probably should have started there since the flavor to me seems almost obviously a husk issue.
If all else fails I’ll start reading about HSA, but to be honest, none of the guys I brew with make any effort at that and I don’t taste any of this phantom grainy flavor in any of their beers. My beers have had it to a greater or lesser extent for so long that I have thought about brewing a few extract kits to see if I still get it.
Could be trhe malt you’re using.
Beat me to it Denny. It is an ingredient issue I would think.
I have ran many a BIAB experiments, and I too get a weird grain flavor, or what think is more of a grain husk flavor. For me it was coming from either direct heating and/or bag squeezing. Either way I stopped with BIAB because of this.
Though I’ve never done BIAB, I’m not certain, but I think I’ve detected this in a couple of my pale lagers lately. I think it may have been a milling issue, since for a couple of batches I was getting more fine boak particles than I’d been accustomed to. Might just have been down to a batch of malt that was susceptible to excessive husk damage under standard milling procedures. At any rate, I’m going to pay a lot more attention to milling speed, and go back to extra measures against HSA, at least all that my mere human-scale brewhouse will admit. (Conventional 2 vessel setup, direct fired mash kettle and separate lauter tun.)
Sometimes lately, I will have days when all beers will have an unpleasant bitter astringency to them. It can be a homebrew, craft, or macro that I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday but it tastes terrible today. And then tomorrow it will taste great again. Not sure what’s going on but it seems to be something with me, not the beer. Anyone else experience this?
Definitely. The older I get the more all my senses mess with me, then throw in some allergens or whatever… Some days I guess you just have to throw out the results. You know, things taste funny today, I’m not taking any tasting notes. On a day when I think my senses are more trustworthy, I’ll make critical assessments of my beer. But even on a bad day, I think we can still rank beers relative to each other. The playing field is still even.
Robert, sounds like you should take my survey