As I posted before I am going to attempt to make 4 or 6 one gallon batches of base malt only beer at the same time.  I originally was looking to do the following: American 2-row, German Pils, English Pale Malt, Munich Malt, 50/50 Wheat/2-row and a specialty malt called ESB malt (I saw it at my LHBS and got curious).

The more I think about the process though, I think I may parse it back the first 4 instead.  The main reason is that I got the green light to do this on the kitchen stove.  With 4 burners and 4 stock pots I should be able to do this relatively faster than if I was to do it on my two burners in the garage.  My plan is straight forward.  Mash 2lbs of each malt in 2.5 qts water (164F strike temp, 1.25qt/lb).  I hope to hit a mash temp somewhere in the 154F range.  I’ll do the mashes simply in stock pots, and store them in a warmed oven for 60 minutes to hold the temp.  This method will help ensure that they all are subject to the same general temp and temp swings for the duration of the mash.

I’ll sparge each one over a stainless steel mesh colander that I have used in the past for mini-mashing and steeping grains.  I’ll rinse each mash through the colander with enough 168F water to get me to 1.5 gallons total.  Then I’ll boil each one for 60 minutes with a single Magnum charge of hops.  Sounds straight forward.  I might use the big pot and propane cooker to fire up the strike and sparge water, just for convenience and speed.  But next thing I need to do is borrow a couple 2 gallon stock pots…

BREW ON!

As part of out time saving tips post, I mentioned that cold steeping grains may help shave a little time off the brew day.  This post will address how I view you can use cold steeping for saving a little time on brew day.  This post will also address what advantages and disadvantages cold steeping poses in the normal brew process regardless of time saving efforts.

The origin of the cold steep arises from the potential acrid astringency that heavily roasted black malts can bring to a recipe.  Malts such as black patent, carafa III, roasted barley and the like are all kilned at very high temperatures essentially burning the husk and putting a deep roast into the starches and sugars within the grain kernel.  This can lead to an ashy flavor whenever you add too much of these grains to a recipe.  In an effort to get a really dark beer, it is easy to over do it.

The results of a cold steep for dark roasted malts are best exemplified in the schwarzbier style.  Schwarzbier at its simplest is like a black (close to opaque) looking pilsner.  The greatest examples of schwarzbier have practically no roasted flavor.  The black malts lend only color to the beer.  How do you achieve this at home?  Well, cold steeping was one technique developed to get there.

Cold steeping dark roasted malt tends to extract only color and very little flavor from black malts.  The cold temp tends to not allow some of the ashy flavors to come out of the husk.  There are other techniques and ingredients available to help get color without flavor (carafa special and sinimar) but cold steeping is cheap and works with the ingredients you’d have on hand for the a recipe anyway.
[On a side note: employing the cold steep for infusing coffee beans or cocoa nibs into your wort is a great technique; but a subject for another post.]

The advantages to the cold steep is the extraction of color and some malt flavors without much introduction of astringent or harsh burnt husk flavors when using black malt.  A disadvantage of the cold steep process is that when you are not including these malts with other base malt at normal steeping temps you do tend to introduce a little unconverted starch into your brew.  In the case of black beers this might not be a big issue.  Secondly, if you are keeping the grains to less that 5-10% of the total grain bill that contribution is negligible.

How does this equate to saving time?  When I used to extract brew, I used to set up my boil kettle on the burner filled with water the night before.  The next day all I had to do was fire up the burner and get going.  I would heat the water to ~150-160F. Kill the heat and add my steeping grains.  After 30 minutes, I’d pull the grains out, refire the burner and start adding extract when I got to ~180F.  Using cold steeping practiced, you can put your grain bags of crystal and roasted malts into the water the night before also.  The next morning, pull out the bags and fire up the kettle.  When you get to ~180F start adding your extracts and proceed as normal.

Now, I know what you are thinking.  Why not just put the bags in at starting temp, then heat the water with them in there?  You can do that, but I found in the past that I get slightly better flavoring and color (in terms of intensity) when either the grains sat in the 150F water for 30 minutes or were steeped overnight.  I never really seemed to get full impact when I did the “ramping-to-temp” steep and heat process.  The steep and heat process was how I first started brewing.  After scortching the bag to the bottom of a heating kettle a couple times I went to the heat then steep practice and liked the flavor much better.

So you may not think of this as a big time savings, but when you combine this with other time savings steps that we have outlined, I think it all begins to add up.
Hopefully, this primer on cold steeping helps you out whether as another way to craft some dark beers without astringent flavors, or maybe it helps trim a few more minutes out of the brew session.  Either way, let us know what you think.

BREW ON!

During the all grain brewing session on Friday night, Brew Dude Mike gave some batch sparging tips that we captured on video.  The tips are focused on how much sparge water is needed to hit our boil volume target.  The volume of sparge water is calculated based on how much we expect to get out of our mash tun in our first runnings.  Watch the video to learn more about what you need to keep in mind when batch sparging.

Although our mash was a little thin, our extraction was pretty high.  I think when we checked the specific gravity on the first runnings, it was over 1.080.  I think it was due to the fact that we had such a fine crush…which we talked about in other posts.

Check out more information on the brew day!

Since I have only done one partial mash in the past, I thought I would brush up on the technique. Here are my top 10 points I can pass on to would be partial mashers:

1. Get your hands on the October 2006 issue of BYO magazine. It has a great article on countertop partial mashing.
2. I bought a picnic cooler to mash in. You don’t need one, but it helps to keep the temperature of your mash steady.
3. I haven’t modified the cooler to make it easy to separate the wort from the grain like a false bottom or a manifold, so I am just going to use a grain bag. I am going to keep the bag as loose as possible to ensure I get a good soak.
4. There are a few different ratios of hot water to grain out there. I am going to use Chris Colby’s 1.375 quarts to every pound of grain.
5. I know I should heat up more water than I need and I should heat it 11-15 degrees hotter than my mash temperature.
6. After mashing for an hour, I will open the spigot and let the wort drain into a large pitcher. Then I will pour it back over the grains to recirculate it since the first runnings are cloudy and probably full of husks.
7. Then, I will drain the cooler into my pitcher again until all the sweet, sweet wort has flowed out of the cooler
8. I will then pour the wort gently into my brew pot.
9. After draining the cooler, I will fill it up again with water that will settle to 170 F and I will let it sit there for 5 minutes and then drain it again.
10. Not sure how much water I will need to add to the wort to get to total of 6 gallons to brew (I will need 6 gallons for the boil to end up with 5 gallons in the fermenter), but that amount is what I will put in my kettle.

If I think of other partial mashing tips, I will post them. I probably will have a bunch after my brew sessions.

I was doing some random reading about mash enzymes and realized I had the wrong impression about which enzyme did what during conversion. I had my thoughts backwards about alpha- and beta- amylase. So I’m posting my new found knowledge here:

Beta-amylase- only cleaves starch chains from the ends resulting the disaccharide maltose (2 glucoses). Optimum temp is 140-148F
Alpha-amylase- preferentially cleaves the brach points of starch molecules leaving unbranched chains, can also cleave the chain ends to generate maltose. Optimum temp is 158F-ish.

When we mash at 154 we get a good mix of both beta- and alpha-amylase activity. That “cooperativity” leads to a very fast conversion. Next time you do a single 154F mash, get some iodine and start testing it every 5 minutes. Seeing as it only costs a few drops of wort, it’s not a big deal. From what I have read within 20 minutes or so you’ll be probably be done converting. (I may have to try this at some point and report back as an experiment) The longer mash time just leads to a drier and drier wort. (FWIW, I still do 60 minute mashes. Although I did my ESB with a 40 minute 154F rest and it seemed fine).

Remember too that alpha-amylase (158F optimum temp), can also cleave the ends not just the branches. So you can get a very fermentable wort by mashing at 158F. It just takes a lot longer time. If you have ever heard of people doing overnight mashes, that is what they are doing. Essentially degrading all the beta with a 158 mash in, then its just alpha slowly working on all the branched then unbranched starches (amylose).
I think that is how things like Mich Ultra is made, long high temp mashes.