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Question From Boiling with Dr Charlie Bamforth – BeerSmith Podcast #121

StatsnBrew

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Near the beginning of this podcast there was some discussion about "manganese" but I wondered if they were really referring to "magnesium".  Magnesium is much more abundant in nature than manganese and is also much more well known for its effects on beer flavor.  Anybody know which of those elements were really being discussed?
 
To be honest I thought he was talking about Magnesium when we were doing the show but looking back Dr Bamforth is usually quite specific in his language so in retrospect I think he may have meant Manganese.  According to Wikipedia Manganese does play an important role in plant photosynthesis and that would match up with his comments regarding its presence in barley.

Brad
 
He was most definitely talking about Manganese, not Magnesium. Manganese originates from grain and over time goes through a redox with unsaturated fatty acids, also part of malt. Manganese isn't a yeast nutrient and isn't degraded in the brewing process, and is a powerful oxidizer. It's been studied along with malt derived Iron and Copper levels in wort as they relate to mash conversion, fermentation and flavor stability.

I wouldn't sound any alarms, though. Manganese is in every beer and the standard array of techniques to keep oxygen low and beer cold do a pretty good job of preserving freshness.

He was talking about studying hops as another source of oxidation by manganese, specifically late kettle and dry hopping, since there is no intervening boil to drive off oxygen introduced by these methods.

Just my observation, but we may have empirically figured this out, since lots of brewers are finding better hop aroma from shorter dry hop cycles.
 
Thanks for the clarification.  As usual the podcast introduced me to a new wrinkle in brewing and sent me off to research it a bit.
 
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