Pils Malt and Soap

[Westco]

Wow thanks for all of the detailed replies. Not sure where to start....Well I have very soft water where I live. Everything is in the single digits with hardness at 29 PPM. If I do just a simple beer with only base malt and don't adjust with salts i will get a low PH of 4.6-4.8-ish or this is at least what my Ph strips say its at. When I make darker beers I tend to have to add a lot of salts to keep the PH up, still I have never got the PH above 5.0% just because I did not want to use so many salts in the brew.

Possible trub in the fermentation: What is too much trub? I jus got a new system that allows me to keep most if not all the trub in the kettle. I use to have 2 inches or so but now after it settles its more like 1 inch.

Fermentation: I have temp control so thats not a issue. I always use MR Malty for pitching rates. I can't say that I Never get off flavors due to poor sanitation so who really knows if that were the problem. I am going to say its not not because of me but because of my friends brews. like I mentioned he has been brewing for 15 years (worked in a professional brewery) and has won so many awards he has a wall covered in them. his brew still tasted soapy to me and I am willing to bet that he has his sanitation down.

High hopping levels: Doubt it, I made a kolsch and a germans pils both with bittering only additions that ranged from 20 IBU-32 IBU.

I will continue to poor over all those detailed replies and see if I can't get this figured out. Thanks guys!

[ajdelange]

....Well I have very soft water where I live. Everything is in the single digits with hardness at 29 PPM. If I do just a simple beer with only base malt and don't adjust with salts i will get a low PH of 4.6-4.8-ish or this is at least what my Ph strips say its at. When I make darker beers I tend to have to add a lot of salts to keep the PH up, still I have never got the PH above 5.0% just because I did not want to use so many salts in the brew.

Are you giving us values for finished beer pH or mash pH? 4.6 - 5 represents is a bit high for beer but way too low for mash (you'd probably be OK at 5 but not below that). Beer pH isn't that important. If you get mash pH right proper beer pH will follow (unless something screws up the fermentation - checking beer pH and especially wort pH within a few hours of pitching is a good way to tell that fermentation is healthy. A good pH for cast out wort is around 5 or a bit over. Within 8 hours or so it should drop below 5 and by the time the fermentation is going full bore it should be around say 4.4 - 4.6 for lagers and as much as 0.4 lower than that for ales.

In a distilled water (the softest water you can get) mashwith no dark malt the pH should run 5.7 - 5.8. In my experiments with roast barley it took 30% of that stuff to get mash pH down to 5.2 so you shouldn't need to add any salts to your dark beers unless you are using a heck of a lot of roast malts.

Note that strips tend to read 0.3 low.

In summary the numbers you have posted don't compute. While this may have little if anything to do with the soapiness you are concerned with in general a well managed mash/fermentation WRT pH (and other parameters) tends to produce beers free of errors so it is important to get pH into the right range in the mash because, as noted earlier, if it's right in the mash it will very probably be right throughout the rest of the process.

[Westco]

I am giving you Mash PH, I have never taken a TG finished beer PH. I have always suspected that those PH strips I have are BS. Using John Palmers spreadsheet it shows that I have zero RA. It doesn't seem to matter what beer I brew or what salts I add or don't add the strip always reads the same which is in the high 4. something. This is kinda frustrating beings I can't really tell what amount of salts I need to add to make really dark beers. One thing I do know is that the water around here is really soft. Single digit soft, and if my RA comes out around zero then i know that using darker malts will drop my PH below the desired amount. Maybe I should just do away with the trips and get a meter. Not unless anyone else has a better way?

Back on topic: I just tasted a german pilsner i brewed about 4 months ago. i left it in the keg forever without tasting it because during fermentation it had one off flavor. Come to find out sometimes in the yeast I used it can produce a certain off flavor but it did go away. With that said I still get soapy notes. I make blonde ales a lot and never get soap in those brews, its only when I use a simple Pils malt grain bill with only one or maybe 2 malts. I am going to brew up a Kolsch for a upcoming competition, I will try to make sure little to no apparent trub gets into the fermenter to see how that comes out.

[Dirk McLargeHuge]

Wow thanks for all of the detailed replies. Not sure where to start....Well I have very soft water where I live. Everything is in the single digits with hardness at 29 PPM. If I do just a simple beer with only base malt and don't adjust with salts i will get a low PH of 4.6-4.8-ish or this is at least what my Ph strips say its at. When I make darker beers I tend to have to add a lot of salts to keep the PH up, still I have never got the PH above 5.0% just because I did not want to use so many salts in the brew.

Possible trub in the fermentation: What is too much trub? I jus got a new system that allows me to keep most if not all the trub in the kettle. I use to have 2 inches or so but now after it settles its more like 1 inch.

Fermentation: I have temp control so thats not a issue. I always use MR Malty for pitching rates. I can't say that I Never get off flavors due to poor sanitation so who really knows if that were the problem. I am going to say its not not because of me but because of my friends brews. like I mentioned he has been brewing for 15 years (worked in a professional brewery) and has won so many awards he has a wall covered in them. his brew still tasted soapy to me and I am willing to bet that he has his sanitation down.

High hopping levels: Doubt it, I made a kolsch and a germans pils both with bittering only additions that ranged from 20 IBU-32 IBU.

I will continue to poor over all those detailed replies and see if I can't get this figured out. Thanks guys!

There has been a lot of great information here, but maybe I am misunderstanding something: I thought you had started noticing the soapy flavor in all the light lagers you had been running across. To that I would suggest that maybe you have become sensitive to the flavor now. It seems a little unlikely that all the light lagers of that style all have the same flaws.

[Westco]

I suppose some would call it a flaw others not. The weird thing is that not all light pilsner based lagers have that flavor. I was just curious if anyone knew a way to get rid of that flavor . Some just describe it as the actual pils malt taste. Maybe I can find a brand of pils malt where this flavor is not there.

[brewinhard]

What maltster of pils are you using? I have brewed extensively with Dingemann's Pilsner and Weyermann and found neither of them to exhibit this characteristic. I also don't make a huge deal about letting some extra trub into my primary fermenter, even with lagers. I just make sure that when I rack to a keg for lagering that I avoid picking any up. I have never tasted before. Although, I do think I remember one judges comments one one of my beers from a couple of years ago saying they tasted a soapy flavor, but I can't remember which beer it was for. Are you tasting this right after primary fermentation is over or after lagering for awhile? Could you be confusing this flavor with DMS or possibly oxidation, or even a combination of the two?

[BDawg]

I'm pretty sure that JP is sensitive to soapy off flavors. I'm neither overly or under sensitive to soapy flavors.
I'm a BJCP judge. If you want to send me a bottle, I'll taste it for you and let you know if I get it. Or, maybe you can find another judge that that is near where you live that can help you out too.

Where do you live?

[Westco]

I live part time in portland Oregon and part time in Hood River Oregon. I did have my friend who is BJCP judge describe it as something else. It could be that to me it comes off as soap but to others its just the way the malt tastes. I am thinking about going to a home brew comp in Albany oregon next month if you guys are going aswel.