Hi all,

Question for you about my brew day yesterday. I was brewing an English Pale (ESB style) and found that the beer going into the fermenter had a very strong off-flavour, bitter and like tea, which I assume is astringency. John Palmer suggests the dark brown gunk on the krausen is really astringent and bitter, tasting like a harsh tea, and may be caused by hot mash/sparge.

The first 3 gallons of the 7 gallon sparge was hot - 170-180 degrees. After adding all mash water in, temperatures with mid/high 150s but seemed to work. First runnings tasted fine.

pH was on point, I used a bit of acid malt and additions (Gypsum, epsom salt, etc) to get it in range. may nen khi fusheng pH tests of first runnings was 5.3 and last runnings high 5's.

In the end, I hit close to my target OG (1050 vs target 1053). Fermentation going well.

This was my first experience using a wort chiller plate, which worked very well (212 degs to 72 degs!), but I've never had this taste before.tai nhac chuong

Questions:
Anyone have any experience with a brew like this? Any feedback to validate what I'm thinking is the root cause?
Is there any way to correct this now that it's fermenting?

Edited by user Wednesday, August 03, 2016 8:08:03 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

That's the classic description of tannin extraction.

170 - 180 F is pretty high -- even if that was the temperature of your strike water. If it was the temperature of your mash after dough-in then it's way too high. My strike water has never needed to be above 168 F, and that's for a 15 gallon batch of ale with well over 20 lbs of grain. For most beer recipes you'll want to keep your mash temp in the 152 - 156 F range. And if you batch sparge, 170 F (water temp) is plenty since you're really just rinsing. If your sparge temp is in the 160 - 165 F range it'll do the job.

You probably won't be able to fix this batch. But next time use one of the online calculators for your strike/sparge water temps -- most of them are pretty much spot-on.

Edited by user Friday, October 16, 2015 3:15:09 PM(UTC)  | Reason: correct spelling (you're v. your) duh!