Blender For Milling Biab

[bourbonandoj]

Can I use my blender to mill my grain before I put it in the bag? This is the last thing I have to get in row before I can embark on my brew journey! Or do I have to buy a roller mill? Any help appreciated.

 

[mkstalen]

I havn't transitiond to the biab yet (I've bought the voille but have yet to sew it into a bag..) But from reading through these forums plenty of guys use a coffee grinder (doing small batches at a time) for this. Not sure how a standard blender would go, don't know if you'd hit all the grains. Probably better off with a food processor, or a coffee grinder.

 

[Steve]

Can I use my blender to mill my grain

Nope.

But im sure someone will pop up in a tick and say yeah, course you can, works great with great efficiency and great beer, being running tests on this for months now, works great for me.

Ask your grain supplier to crack it for you.

Cheers
Steve

 

[zebba]

I tried it once with a blender. 80g carapils, whirrrr, whirrr, whirrr, for quite a while. Half of it was ground to dust, the other half was completely untouched. It got a massive "F" from me. May have worked better with a bigger amount.

 

[felten]

I was in the same position a few months ago where I had to crush 2kg of base malt, and decided to give my blender and coffee/spice grinder a try. The coffee grinder did a far better job of breaking up all the grains. With the blender, like zebba said, I found it left a lot of grains untouched.

The best option though is to buy it pre-crushed and use it up asap.

 

[eamonnfoley]

A good blender with pulverise the grain to dust (well mine did anyway), and leave nothing intact. Techincally you dont need grain husks for BIAB, and with proper mash PH you may be ok. But I've never tried it (except with roasted barley to get more colour out). I reckon you should give it a go, but make sure your mash PH is 5.2-5.4 - this is critical.

However if you can get your HBS to crush it for you that would be better.

 

[black_labb]

i did a full 5kg batch the other night with a blender. the trick to getting it even is holding the blender on an angle so that the grain circulates watch the grain and adjust the angle until you see the grains circulating (you want the blended stuff to fly up and land on the top of the pile. i was doing 250g bits at a time. its not quick, but i have the urn next to me and it goes straight into the urn at mashing temp, then i turn the urn on when finished and adjust for the lost heat.

 

[Nick JD]

I do 1kg in 3 minutes in a coffee grinder. It was designed to mince hard seeds.

 

[boobiedazzler]

I was told that there is a high risk of astringent tastes due to a greater surface area of husk. Which surprised me, considering Nick's thread, and no reports of tannin flavours etc.

Anyone wish to comment on why they think this is a bad thing for BIAB, to pulverise the entire grain weight to dust ? All I can think of is a greater trub at the end of the boil and in the fermenter.

 

[RdeVjun]

I was told that there is a high risk of astringent tastes due to a greater surface area of husk. Which surprised me, considering Nick's thread, and no reports of tannin flavours etc.

Anyone wish to comment on why they think this is a bad thing for BIAB, to pulverise the entire grain weight to dust ? All I can think of is a greater trub at the end of the boil and in the fermenter.

Funny that, if it were true, I reckon a whole heap of BIABers not using a mill probably should've tipped out all their beer long ago. I must have missed that thread, darn it.

That's the thing about BIAB, it is partly the product of challenging 'conventional wisdom', some of which was shown to be crap, at least at this scale.

 

[boobiedazzler]

Youre right there about old conventional wisdom. I notice around the traps a bit of trepidation accepting BIAB. Not that it has stopped me from pulverising some of my grain bill. Although I did find that wheat grain was a bugger, some of it refused to crack in the food processer. Next time it will go into the coffee grinder !

It does also make sense that a finer crush will mean a greater level of trub. No worries for me, doing no-chill it settles out before I transfer to the fermenter.

 

[felten]

I think you're only really at risk of extracting tannins during the sparge when it could come in contact with higher pH water, ie. fly sparging, and biab does away with that step