Another Silly Brew Experiment

[Thirsty Boy]

In sake and rice wine brewing they dont crush the grain - they dont crush if they are using millet or barley to make those sorts of grain liquor either. And someone the other day was saying in one of the threads I was reading that uncrushed malt would yield about 70% efficiency if you were patient enough to let it mash properly...


Now , I have a bunch of grain lying about that I am pretty much going to chuck away due to it not being fresh anymore... and I need a few litres of starter wort anyhow, so out comes the BIAB bag and the experimentin' pot. In goes 1.25kg of uncrushed pale malt and 7 or 8L of 35 water. I'm calculating for 50% efficiency.

Its been soaking for just shy of two hours now (still a few crunchy ones in there) and when I think its properly hydrated, I will bring it up to 65 and keep it there for a few hours, maybe overnight (warm oven) - then up to 72 for an hour - and then drain. See what happens.

My thought experiment for how you could make this a "practical" brewing method would be along the lines of:

Uncrushed grains into eski lined with BIAB material - soak in a little more than their weight of cold tap water - walk away overnight (10-15mins effort)
Before work - Infuse with boiling water to get to a Beta amylase rest, probably a lowish one for good enzyme survival. maybe 62-63? Go to work. (30 odd mins effort)
After work - Infuse with more boiling water to get to a 70-72 Alpha amylase rest, giveing you a "full" volume as per BIAB - go to bed (30 odd mins effort)
Saturday morning - pull the bag, squeeze/drain etc and run the wort into your boiler - boil as per normal brew (2 or 3 hours)

A process that takes longer altogether (what with being three days).. but only requires small incremental inputs of time for a few days, then a shorter than normal "brew day" to finish.

So - what do you think will happen to my batch? And given that it works (I'm not saying it will mind you) what do you think about the thought experiment steps?? Can you suggest a better imaginary way to do "very" long mashes and lash the poor old uncrushed grain into converting and yielding its sugars?

Please don't give me a heap of "why would you bother.." I'm not suggesting anyone actually brew this way - its just as the title suggests, a silly brew experiment, some in a my pot, some in my head. If you find it interesting, join in.

TB

 

[newguy]

Sounds worthwhile just to see what happens. Are you planning to use some sort of mechanical press to squeeze out the grains?

 

[marksfish]

i seem to remember hearing or reading some where that most grain is contaminated with lactobacillis or other bugs, the long soak could turn the mash into sourmash.

 

[troopa]

Id hate to say it but i do tend to agree with Mark
The Cider boys out there might have more info on this
But would a camden tablet in the mash kill off most nasties ?
And seeing as its going to get boiled anyway i wouldnt think that there would be any real residial affects of it

Oh and how about adding a bit of Zinc to aid with conversion?

Tom

 

[Bribie G]

A forum buddy gave me a recipe from Dave Line's Big Book of Brewing from the early 1970s. Bugger me I'd almost forgotten about him, I actually bought that book at the time and made some cracking AG beers. Anyway the instructions for this beer - a fairly standard UK bitter - include "Mash for 2 hours or overnight". In those days using my Brewheat boiler with a tea strainer behind the tap as a 'braid' I used to get some horrendous set mashes on sparging, and used to let them drain out overnight and still made some bloody good beers. My mates at the steelworks who were weaned on Brains SA and Dark used to rave over them, which was a compliment as I lived 3 doors from a Brains pub B)

I'd go overnight. Love to hear the results.

 

[reviled]

Id be thinking sour mash as well? especially if it was over 3 days total..

Definately interesting experiment tho, will be keen to see the results..

 

[stillscottish]

I've mashed overnight (as per Dave Line's book) a few times with no problems. I don't think I'd do it though with a Big beer as it tends to give a more fermentable wort.
I also regularly mash for 2-3 hours but that's more to with having to do shopping, etc. Again with no noticeable ill-effects.

I don't think long mashes at mash temp will lead to souring but I've had problems in the past with a stuck all-grain bourbon mash that I left for a while to drain. That was definitely a sour mash by the time it was finished (but wasn't a bad thing)

Cheers

Campbell

 

[NickB]

Have always contemplated trying an overnight or 24+ hour mash in the HERMS just to see what I can achieve efficiency wise, but have never had the chance... Might give it a go, should be able to keep temp OK......



Cheers

 

[jayse]

It should work fairly well with well modified malts I imagine but I also agree that is a bit long mash time, overnite is one thing but a whole day could be enough to get some nice chinese sweet and sour soup flavours going on.

 

[MHB]

I suspect that the husk of the grain will act as a "selective" semi-permeable membrane, that's its job, to let water in so the corn can sprout, evolution is a fairly remorseless and unforgiving mother, grain that allow sugar to leached out of the germinating corn would have a very low survival probability.

I think the grain will get big and fat, as it takes up about its own mass in water and keep all the sugar inside it, great for making crystal malt but no good otherwise. In fact that's pretty much how crystal is made; if the sugar could leak out we couldn't make crystal malt.

The grains mentioned in the OP are all polished grains, the same problem would be encountered with raw rice or millet.

Sorry

MHB

 

[Thirsty Boy]

mmm I dunno about sourness - maybe - at 60+ you are adding Pastuerising units.. lacto probably aren't going to get killed, but I don't know if they are going to be happy either. Probably depend on how much it cooled down and how many bugs survived till then.

Might get a bit going in the initial soak water... could be an idea to drain and rinse before moving to higher temps??

I might leave this one overnight to see if it does develop any acidity. If it doesn't in the low 60s... I'm gonna guess it'll be OK in the 70's.

MHB - I suspect you are right... but, perhaps given a long hot soaking and a very excessive level of moisture, the husk's ability to selectively pass moisture might well be interfered with, or they might just rupture? I get the crystal malt argument.. but that process is happening over a pretty short period of time in a lower moisture environment... it might make a difference.

Guess I'll find out one way or the other - thats all part of the fun!

Newguy has it though... need a juicer!! squeeze out those little sugar bags.

I want this wort for a starter... so if it stays trapped - I'll bamix the buggery out of it and run it through the BIAB bag.... that'll get their guts out of em.

Cheers

TB

 

[Vitalstatistix]

This might be a stupid question, but would sanitising everything and doing a short pre-soak soak in starsan kill off the lacto and prevent a sour mash?

 

[Thirsty Boy]

This might be a stupid question, but would sanitising everything and doing a short pre-soak soak in starsan kill off the lacto and prevent a sour mash?

Might.... I am less worried about it today than I was yesterday however.

Some results

After a few hours hydrating... I got bored and pushed the mash up to 62 -- maintained temp in a v'slow oven for 4-5hrs -- up to 64-65 by the time I remembered it and went for a look.

Out of oven and onto stovetop - stirred while heating to 75. Then I shoved it inside a Coles blue cooler bag, shoved that insid another one; and shoved that inside my eski - and went to bed.

Busy all day and didn't bother looking until tonight.. so 24+hrs after it went into the eski - 30+hrs from when I added the first water. Thats not a lot less than the process I described for my thought experiment which comes in at 30-36hrs. It was still at 45C!! I dumped it all into my BIAB bag and drained 4.5L of liquid. Question is... is it just cloudy water or is it wort??

It is - 4.5L of 10.1 brix (1.039) wort with no trace of sourness - this equates to an efficiency of 46% .. not bad with no sparge and an L:G ratio of 4.6:1

So obviously.. something is going on. The sugar is getting out of the grain somehow. I imagine quite lot of the grains have ruptured when I stirred a bit, some would have been broken in the first place.. but I suspect that some osmosis is going on and sugar is migrating out of what is probably a very high inside grain concentration to a lower outside grain concentration -- I imagine that there must simply be a limit to how selective the semi permeability of the husk/pericap/testa of the grain can be; and it's being overwhelmed by concentration, time and temperature.

To test it out, and to see if the process can be pushed a bit, I decided on an "osmosis" sparge. I heated another 4.5L of water to boiling and dropped in the BIAB bag and the grain (grain at 36C by then) - giving a total mash temp of 76C. After stirring for 1 minute the gravity of the liquid was 0.0 brix, so ther wasn't any easily "rinsable" sugar present - after 30 mins it was 1.2 brix - And then it went back into its eski and cooler bags for another night's rest.

See what comes out of it tomorrow. But so far - much more successful than I expected. Looks like I wont need to resort to the bamix after all

TB

 

[troopa]

How about getting teh mash paddle or paint stirrer in there towards the end and give it a decent "Mash"... might help open up the husks more when they
are soft

Hey this might be why they called the mash paddle a mash paddle
Maybe back in the very old days they "mashed" the full grains because they hadnt figured out crushing was a better way

Tom

 

[Thirsty Boy]

That'd work - in fact I know it does. A couple of the GF beers I have made. I didn't bother crushing the millet I used - it went whole into the rice cooker for pre-cooking, then once in the mash tun, its was whizzed with the bamix. A bamix is just a modern kinda masher... it does nothing you couldn't do with a big potato masher and a bit of sweat. And I think maybe you are right.. crushing came after brewing. Because brewing without crushing, seems to actually work!!

Results of the osmosis sparge:

4.35L of 3.9brix wort

Combine that with the 4.4L of 10.1brix from the first runnings and you get 8.75L @ 7.018brix - which will boil down to 5L @ 12.3brix.

Now I am using grain with an extract value of 74.5% (lowish) and have extracted .123 x 5000 = 615g of sugar from 1250g of grain. This means I have extracted with an efficiency of 615/(1250x0.745) x 100 = 66%

So - given a bit of inaccuracy for my figures - it pans out at around 65% efficiency give or take a couple of points. Which isn't a whole heaping lot worse than some people get using crushed grain.

Given a couple of goes to refine the process, and a bit of post hydration "mashing of the grains" as per Troopa's suggestion - I think you could reduce the sparge volume and boil time (although lots of sparge and long boils weren't exactly uncommon in days of yore...) and still get it up close to 70% efficiency.

An interesting if mainly pointless and silly brew experiment - and to me, a quite surprising result.

TB

 

[Thirsty Boy]

no pictures no proof

L to R: 4.5ish L of wort no-chilling in its demijohn - 750ml of trub and lost wort - Spent grain.


Hotbreak and goo - as much as I would expect from a "crushed" batch ... maybe a little less.


Spent grain looking very much uncrushed.


And gravity - ended up with about 5.2L so 11.8 brix is what I expected.



TB

 

[coeliacsurvivor]

An interesting if mainly pointless and silly brew experiment.....

TB

We wouldn't have any where near as many interesting beers if it weren't for lots and lots of pointless and silly brew experiments.

Well done on this one, it's good to know these things are possible even if they don't make it into the modern brewers handbook.

 

[matti]

Great work TB
I listen to Brewstrong podcast and one of the comment was" Grain with water just wants to turn into beer just give it enough time".

You have once again proved the point of how beer once originated.

Just piss talk here TB...... great picture though....
And good education for the the "nooo" in the business of brewing

 

[kieran]

I wonder if you could do a hot liquid "cracking" stage.
Add to the grain boiling water, so it hits very hot. I wonder if this will pop a few of those grain husks open... and it might also serve as to kill off any bacteria on the grain husks. Then let it cool to swell, and continue as normal.

At that stage, enzymes aren't in solution, so probably wouldn't be denatured by the direct temperature spike. Of course, the temperature will drop immediately, but the first contact might be enough to help that out.

maybe worth a shot?

 

[troopa]

I think this is where the Tannin bandwagoners will chime in and say that .. "youll extract tannins at that temp and create a weird and wonderful brew" (Well maybe not that last bit).
You should try it and let us know if it works. Even with a 1kg experiment

Tom