The taste isn’t baby sick , it’s definitely metallic, it actually reminded me of the smell you’d get when cutting on a lathe of drilling with a big drill bit … Random I know 😂
Anyway … thought I’d take the steam tip off to check it , it appeared clean enough but the plastic pipe that lines the steam arm was blackish at the end. I took the arm off and stripped it / cleaned all the bits and pushed a bit of kitchen towel moistened with Puly Caf through it - see pic.
Reassembled and brought machine up to temp, I filled a container with some water from the HW tap and steamed it without purging, terrible taste again. I purged the wand for 30secs and re did the test, taste was fine, tried just steaming into a container and smell was ok.Steamed some tap water and taste was ok.
When the machine had almost cooled down I open the steam tap into a container and the bad metallic taste was there.
So looks like I can get around issue by a decent purge. I’ll keep an eye on it but seems strange.
Maybe it’s just my sense of taste , I can sniff a wine that’s corked from 20 paces but my wife would happily drink it.
I think it’s “ stale water / steam” on initial boiler heat up either lying in the pipe, or, when the boiler is heating there is enough time delay prior to steaming to affect the taste of the steam.