Do crystal malts add more unfermentables?

[primusbrew]

This is an interesting thread. Thanks for posting verysupple.

This makes me wonder about adding crystal malts at mash out instead of at the start of the mash as a technique to lower attenuation. Is this something that people are doing? Or is a higher mash temp a better way of achieving the same outcome?

This is timely also as I am having my first crack at a partigyle tomorrow and am planning to steep different specialty grains in the two lots of runnings I collect. I will need to give some thought to how I go about incorporating the spec grains.

This also makes me consider the value of a malt like carapils. It would appear that you need to have it as a pretty high proportion of your grist for it to have much of an impact on the fg. Or does carapils add 'body' in a way that is not reflected by a final gravity reading?

 

[verysupple]

I think there are better ways to adjust the attenuation than adding crystal malts at mash out. Partly because I'm not sure the effect would be very large and partly because I'm always looking for ways to make my brew day easier. All malts in at once is just easier.

Partigyle is something I've been wanting to try for a while, but only having one FV and not doing NC cubes makes it not very practical. I hope it goes well, though, and keep us apdated on how handling the spec. grains affects things.

I've only used Carapils 2 - 3 times so I'm not that familiar with it. I think you're right in terms of having to use a lot to affect the attenuation but I'm also interested to hear from experiences if the body it's supposed to add isn't related to FG.

 

[ebyelyakov]

Thanks for the share a great article. Guess I will need to adjust by fermentable/unfermentable sugar calculation in my spreasheet.. I stopped using B-Smith and do it all by hand (XLS I mean) - just makes it easy for my own system...

 

[verysupple]

Cheers. I know what you mean about using a spreadsheet. I also use a spreadsheet that is designed for my system and my processes. It includes options for little tweeks to my processes that I use sometimes. For example, sometimes if I want a really hoppy beer that isn't that bitter I will remove the early hop additions from the kettle before doing a hop stand, but most times I don't bother removing them. So I have an option that changes the way IBUs are calculated based on that choice. The spreadsheet actually started its life as Ianh's kit 'n' kilo / extract spreadsheet. As I moved to partial mashing and then AG the spreadsheet evolved. So a big thanks to ianh for doing a lot of the basic work on that!

Anyhoos, that's getting a bit off track. I never bothered adjusting FG calculations based on the amounts or types of crystal malts in a recipe because with the beers I usually brew (typically very little crystal malt, if any, and never over 10 %) it just doesn't seem to make a difference. One of my favourite beers that I've brewed a number of times is a Maris Otter / Centennial SMaSH. When I added about 5 % crystal to that recipe to make it a bit closer to the guidelines for an APA it didn't change the FG at all. When I decided to use a different yeast strain the FG changed by 0.002. Once when I screwed up my sacc. rest temp it also changed the FG by 0.002. My spreadsheet accounts for these variables and predicted the results to within 0.001 every time. So I guess I don't see the point in trying to model the affect of crystal malt when the difference it makes is less than the uncertainty in my other calculations anyway.