Why Is My Stout Metallic?

[tangent]

i vote #1 and maybe #2
#5 has a deal with a springwater place.
are you adding salts back to your filtered water?

 

[braufrau]

i vote #1 and maybe #2
#5 has a deal with a springwater place.
are you adding salts back to your filtered water?

No. No added salts. Should I? There seems to be some debate
about whether that's important or not. Guess I need to know what
is left after the filter before I do that!

-braufrau

 

[Screwtop]

Have you contacted your water supply authority and asked them for a chemical analysis, they usually provide them for free (cause we pay em heaps for Rates).

Edit:type

 

[WildaYeast]

I'd vote for the water as a strong possibility. Adelaide's water has come a long way, but it is notoriously noxious to most people's palletes. As the source is the bottom of the Murray, lots of stuff has gone into it from the catchment and some of that, such as mineral hardness, is quite hard to remove in the treatment process. Also, beer has an awful lot of water in it, so quite an opportunity to influence taste. I also suspected this once you said that you thought your previous batch might have had a metalic taste.

I'd suggest you think about changing the filters -- six months is usually a pretty good run, depending on the type of cartridge. If you want to price shop, I found this place to be very competitive and the service was great:

http://www.psifilters.com.au

Cheers, Brian

 

[braufrau]

I wonder if perhaps I'm tasting tannins.
Perhaps I steeped at too high a temperature.
Perhaps with crystal malt its like tea.
There's tea bag tea, innocuous and everybody likes it.
There's a good old fashioned cup of tea which can be a bit challenging.
And then there's my grandmother's cup of tea which you can stand a spoon
up in and cleaves your tongue to the top of your mouth.

What if there's just enough tannin too taste "challenging" but not
enough to give that furry, drying, sensation?

That would explain why both the brews that used crystal and large
amounts had this problem. Tannins can combine with iron to make
a metallic taste.

So perhaps if I'm more careful with the steeping I might get rid of it???

-braufrau

 

[braufrau]

What if there's just enough tannin too taste "challenging" but not
enough to give that furry, drying, sensation?

-braufrau

Oooohhh. I'm liking this theory more and more. Not least because I can fix it! Maybe.
Adelaide water is mostly alkaline which increases tannin extraction.
http://www.sawater.com.au/NR/rdonlyres/0BD.../0/2004DWQR.pdf

Adelaide water is hard. Hills water is only moderately hard. Increases tannin extraction.

The iron on average is 0.06mg/L and .1mg/L is considered high enough to give
a bitter taste but the max in 2004 was 0.35 and I bet that was in summer when the murray is low.

And I probably had the T a little too high.

Not much I can do about the hardness or the iron, but if I do a partial mash, that will fix the pH and
if I do it properly, that will fix the T.

Fingers crossed!

-braufrau

 

[braufrau]

And by the way ... the production date on my malt tins that I used for the brew that is now bottle conditioning
was 018/07. 18th of January, less than a month old, so
extract twang is unlikely to have developed.

 

[Mr Bond]

Depending on your location in adelaide you could take it into your local HBS for some feedback.