Salt aftertaste after fermentation

[emergent7]

Hi all,

I'm a relatively new/young brewer (22 and right out of college with a BS in Cell biology and a half a year of working in a brewery beforehand), now running the brewery side of things at King Arthur's brewpub in Oswego, NY. When I came in, the former brewer had stockpiled some beers, almost all of which tasted distinctly of salt in the aftertaste. Exceptions were his wheat beer and stout. Initially, I believed this to be due to improper cleaning of the fermenter so when it came time for me to brew I made sure I thoroughly cleaned all equipment before attempting fermentation.

My first brew here was an APA. Initially I did not detect any salt during the first few days of fermentation, but now I too am starting to notice signs of this in my beer. I did an acid wash on the rest of my fermenters to try to prevent this in addition to caustic, but now I'm suspecting that there may be something wrong with the water quality but I'm not 100% sure.

Has anyone else experienced this or have any ideas what the culprit is? I've just tracked downthe water report for Oswego and if anyone has any literature on brewing water statistics that has its figures in mg/L (not ppm) it'd be very helpful.

We are currently using a carbon filter of some sort to treat our brewing water, but it differs from the other filters I saw in the previous breweries I worked at (they had 3 sequential, skinnier filters.. probably some sort of sedimentation filter? forgive my ignorance on this).

I'm taking a stab at a hefeweizen next and would like it to turn out impeccable so any help would be greatly appreciated!

[wiredgourmet]

OK, this one is simple: mg/L = ppm. Levels of sodium and chloride are what you should look at first. This is always a matter of taste, but personally I wouldn't like to see more than about 50 ppm of either in my water.

Watch your water treatments; if there is substantial chloride, stay away from, say, sodium bicarbonate; if sodium is high, stay away from calcium chloride, and so on like that.

You can live with high-ish levels of either one if you are careful not to add the complimentary salt. But if you have high levels of both, then one option would be dilution with de-ionized water.

[Moonlight]

Kind of a long shot, but check if your glycol tank is low, as perhaps there is a leak into the fermenter. Run the cooling jacket with the tank empty and look for leaks inside.

[troybinso]

Seems like you need to send a water sample for analysis. Ward labs is quick and cheap, and gives you all of the essentials. You definitely don't want a bunch of sodium in your brewing liquor.

[Darel Matthews]

Are you softening your water? With what type water softener? Ion exchange water softeners will add salt to your brewing water to remove hardness, possibly in enough quantity it makes it through to finished beer.

It kind of plays in that the former brewer's hefe and stout do not taste like salt if he bypasses the water softener to make those beers, since traditionally they are brewed with hard water.

Darel