tintin said:
Fermenting nicely thankyou. No off-smells or flavours (I had a wee taste this morning). Very happy with self. However, one of the problems I experienced (aside from having to do a split boil), was pouring the wort from my little esky into the brew pot. I might have to ladle the stuff out in future. Better gear is on the horizon, but for now I've only got the esky which is fine for these small partials (2-3kg of grain and 4-5litres of water fit nicely). I've heard of hot side aeration, so any ideas on how to transfer the fresh wort from esky to pot would be good.
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Congrats on the first of hopefully many mashes!! :super:
For a partial mash, I grab a large soup ladle and scoop the grains out of the 6 pack esky into the colander and sparge by drizzling a jug of sparge water over the grains. It takes a bit longer, but you make much less mess and I've found that 3 to 4 scoops will take about 400ml of sparge water, without extracting tannins - and I do the whole thing twice. So, roughly speaking, I can get around 10 litres of wort from around 2 kilos of grain but it isn't anywhere near as efficient as actually building a proper mashtun. My partial efficiency usually hovers around 70-75% and occasionally if I get conchy, I can push it up to 80% extraction...I have a clear bucket to put the spent grains in, and I HATE seeing the sweet liquor in the bottom of the bucket when I toss the grains in the compost - that's good wort going to waste!! :angry:
Re Hot Side Aeration (HSA), it's not an issue when you go from the esky to the boil pot as the extract gets boiled and you shouldn't get HSA from the pre-boil wort - the rolling boil knocks out a lot of O2 from the wort. Where you need to be careful is in handling the post-boil wort before it drops under approx. 70C - and as I mentioned on other posts, this is why you need to be careful in how you add a kit concentrate to the wort at the end of the boil / flameout (er that's if you are adding a can of goo). You need to stir gently and avoid bubbles or inadvertantly introducing air to the hot wort.
There is some speculation that HSA is a bit of a momily and many suggest that it's not an issue - but to be honest, I prefer to avoid risk so I basically handle hot wort very carefully (apart from the obvious burning side issues!) and that way I minimise any risk of introducing undesireable affects to the final result.
Of course, once the wort is cooled to yeast pitching temps, you can add air, which I recommend and do with an aquarium pump and an aeration curtain from the local hobby shop - and aerating chilled wort definitely helps out the yeast in adapting to the wort (the adaptive phase) and further ensuring that you have a decent cell count when the yeast starts the fermentation process (the attenuative phase). So only add air or O2 to the wort prior to pitching yeast and after it's cooled to yeast pitching temp.
Cheers,
TL
