Floating Mashes

[matti]

Fly sparging they say is done at a speed around 7 litres per 1/2 hour but can be done quicker if you adjust the brew liqour accordingly.
I am talking theoretically only.
If you can get a mash temperature of 76-78 degrees through out the mash and the pH never rises above 6.5 and most of the husk is intact you can sparge until the Sg is 1.012 without a worry.

More practical solution IMHO is when you have fine crush, (husks that may come through), is to sparge no slower then 7 L per 1/2 hour and ensure the grain bed stays intact when fly sparging. If you stop a sparging at 1.015 or above you have less chance of astringency and clearer wort.

If you make a dark beer this doses off cource not matter as much.
And Darren

Be more positive hehehe

 

[matti]

OOOPS
correction
NOT 7L PER 1/2 HOUR
7 gallons per 1/2 hour

closer to 0.7L/min.

My conversions is all screwed up.

1- 1 1/2 hour fly sparge for a double batch of +50L preboil is normal.

(Gives you enough time time to mow the lawn if you have a big enough urn.)

 

[PostModern]

Have you ever been positive about anything before Darren?

I like to try out something i havnt tried before, before i shoot it down in flames. A lot of what is said by long term members on here is taken seriously by less experienced brewers. When critisism its based on GUESS's and personaly untried aligations, it can be misleading.

I think even the new members know how to take Darren It's good to have the devil's advocate looking over things, but perhaps, as you suggest, a little trial or even some basic research might be in order rather than just WAGs.

Oh, as for equipment, my "fly sparge manifold" is just a flattened BBQ drip tray with a few hundred holes punched thru it with the handle of a dining fork That just floats on the mash and I run the sparge water into the tray. It flows out nice and even.

Pomo how long was your sparge & at what volume?

Here's the thing, I am pretty familiar with my system. As you might guess from the PoMo bucket measuring system, I also approximate things like water (I weigh hops with a small scale and I take gravitry readings to work out bitterness additions and whatnot, tho). It's only let me down one time so far. For the 34L in the cube batch I did this on, I just filled the HLT to "enough" space, sparged until the kettle had "enough" headroom for a boil which just happened to occur when the mashtun drained and the HLT ran dry. Not luck, just experience and familiarity with my system. There is a crease in the kettle and HLT that shows me 25L and I base measurements around those.

Anyway, to answer your question, I ran off for about 90 mins, by which time, the kettle was at a rolling boil, the bittering hops were in and there was about another 20 mins of boil before I pulled out the hose. I guess the biggest risk I have is a plastic taste from the hose being exposed to boiling wort temps Anyway, that was my effort to recover some time. First cube from the batch is in the fermenter now.

 

[Asher]

has anyone got a glass mash tun? I'd love to see some pictures of this method in action

 

[PostModern]

has anyone got a glass mash tun? I'd love to see some pictures of this method in action

Interesting idea. I might save some grain from my next crush and float mash it in a pint glass.

 

[Hutch]

Interesting idea. I might save some grain from my next crush and float mash it in a pint glass.

Good idea PoMo. Would be interested to see how the grain-bed looks over the course of a 1hr mash. Maybe chuck the glass in the oven set to 70deg, and take a few before & after photo's.

 

[Tony]

dont pick up the wrong pint while your brewing

cough cough gag splutter

 

[///]

HELLO....

With a cough, a splutter and a yearning for a solid nights sleep i delve into said method of mashing.

At the very start this is a method of mash management. There is more than one. One of the core separation points I saw between my homebrewing to professional brewing when I first started working with Dr Simon Brooke-Taylor was mash management. In my unenlightened days I would bang things in, bang them out and have huge fuss and bother about other elements in brewing (for eg. how i gripped the pole during my ninny pole dancing routine to excite the yeast).

Simon has really impressed onto Dave and I management of all the elements of beer making; brewing to a tight process and specification to achieve predictable and manageable results. And I have to say it works, there are no surprises in my homebrewing, wort pack production or commercial beer production efforts now. Within a few tight points of Gravity I end up with consistent PG's, TG's and flavour profiles. I see this as absolutely necessary for the volume of wort we move a week.

Reading thru the pages I think a few points are misguided some. Such as why do we wet the grain with foundation water? We do this as at the ranges of 60-72C the starches liquify in the malted barley. With this liquification the enzymes then cleave the long chain starches into sugars. Also, the topic of 'undermodified' malt. What is undermodification?? This is an incomplete processing of the malt by the maltster due to the inherent chemical composition of the malt. Is the malt we buy now 'undermodified'? Well I'd like to see a spec sheet, cos' after having sold Weyermann Malt for a number of years with Dave Cryer I never once saw a spec sheet that indicated anything less than complete modification by the WK index. I'd really like to turn this into a myth buster episode, but that said this is not the subject of the thread. All I will say is that if you think Weyermann would let out poor quality malt that requires a huge amount of time and energy to complete thier work by the brewer, your crazy. Weyermann is a quality based supplier. As Chris Garret from Warminster Malt once said to me, <insert lovelly English accent> 'if any Malster worth his chops in these modern times lets out undermodified malt into the market and makes more work for the brewer, then they should call themselves a stock-feed supplier not malster'.

Ok, back to the thread. There are a few ways to manage a mash. One is to submerge the mash, resting it on the plates of the lauter tun with a thin bed to enable a quick run-off. This is done with a wide flat lauter tun to a depth of about 30-45 cm. Because of the quick run-off and compaction of the bed, rakes are used to cut the bed to enable full extract of sugars. The quick run-off decreases the chance of polyphenol extraction due to the finer crushed husk and oxidative precursors from dissolving substances (forget my notes at work) in the embryo section of the grain. The mash tun plate helps to act like a filter as well. This is very much equipment based, with a usual 4 vessel system of Mash mixer, Lauter tun, kettle and wort receiver (whirlpool)

Next is a mash filter. This is where grain is milled to a flour and put into a mash mixer, pumped to the filter and rested for about a 25 mins. The grain is then sparged quickly (diaprham expands and squeezes out the goodness) with the membrane doing to filtering. This goes on a few times, with weak worts recovered and mashed back into the next batch, meaning efficiencies of 103-105%. Again speed of transfer of the worts and contact time decreases the chances of dissolving polyphenol and embryonic substances for issues down the line. Equipment is often mash mixer, mash filter, kettle, wort receiver. Coopers used this method with thier Mauri Mash Mixer beast ...

Then we have our old friend floating mashes. Yes very much a method of the UK brewers (for some of times passed) and with a different range of parameters. The run off speed should be about 20% run off first hour, 30% next hour, remainder 3rd hour. Yes up to a 3 hour run off. But lets not forget, the first worts are put onto boil straight away, so the last worts only need about 25 minutes. We run a bit quicker in our production and acheive on average 78-80% with about 30-40% first hour - the brewhouse is manual and you need to manager the pumps and valves for each batch.

With all things are in balance, the longer the run off, the courser the crush and the less chance of polyphenol and oxidative precursor's (sure lipids are the main culprit here, will check) dissolving. Also, the slower run off leaves the greater chance to continue the extraction of the sugars from the grain. Enzymic action is encouraged right throughout the process. Due to the often custom made mash plates and breweries, the brewers found the best method to hold back unwanted substrates and produce high quality wort (and beer) was to float the mash and let it self filter compared to letting the grain rest on the plates as a submerged mash would. They also found greater efficiencies were achieved by the slow run off allowing the sugars to be collected thru the deep grain bed. Running off to quickly leaves the more viscous wort behind over the less viscous sparge water. So to the equipment, a mash/lauter tun, kettle and sometimes whirlpool/hopback will be employed. Often high-gravity mashing is also used.

On the pics illustrated, i had a course crush, bright worts and acheived 82% efficiency on that brew, with numbers of 78% and 75% (left tap open and lost some strong wort) on 2 successive brews.

Theres arguments and research for and against each main method, but at the end of the day it comes down to what equipment you have and what you are trying to achieve. My $0.02c worth is that as most HB'ers are using infusion mash tuns with a deep grain bed then a floating mash method is most appropriate. I dont know any hb'er that runs a mash mixer/lauter tun with rakes system or a mash filter (but would be keen to see one in action), hence my opinion here. Also, with the increase usage of high quality raw materials and more money spent on systems, it would be worthwhile to adopt a better approach to mash management at the first step of the beer making process; the mash. Sure 'its only home brewing and you can chuck in a few extra grams of malt', but the pages of this forum are more than filled with folks trying to make the best beer they can, so why not adopt a better approach to all parts of the process than cherry pick parts of the process we think will improve our beer and discount the rest?

By following the advise of Simon, such advise has taken a hack-homebrewer to winning awards at professional comps. So i hope that would be some evidence that a more thoughtful approach to every stage of the process reaps rewards ...

 

[Tony]

With a cough, a splutter and a yearning for a solid nights sleep i delve into said method of mashing.

For a second there you drank PoMo's pint :lol:

Great post mate !

 

[dicko]

Hi all,

This is certainly very interesting.
Now having read all of the above posts am I lead to assume that provided we are using an infusion mash tun that the only thing we need to do to achieve a floating mash is to crush coarser (?) and sparge very slowly using the "fly" method?
There is no need to chage manifolds, false bottoms, braids etc ???

Cheers

 

[///]

No change to equipment is necessary, as long as you follow a things: course crush, about 2.5l:1 liquor to grist, a slow run off and manage sparge water coming slowly and evenly (at the moment I am doing this with a jug). The course crush is the widest setting on my ye-old barley crusher.

It can take a few times to get it right, and occasionally you stuff it up, but saves all the mucking around with batch/dump sparging.

In answer to Tony's post, i just had PoMo's 'Its a Floater' beer. Rather than a cough and a splutter, i would have loved to strip naked and rubbed it all over myself. That of course, in a non-****-erotic-illawarra-brewers-union kinda way that is ...

 

[Tony]

So would it be worth drawing from the top of the mash tun and pumping back in the bottom (like underletting) to both stir the mash and also maintain temp using the HERMS coil in my HLT?

Or is that not how it works?

I have been toying with the idea of doing this with my finer crushed grist to try and get better conversion (already getting 80+%)

I lose a bit of heat from my ss mash tun, even with it insulated some what.

cheers

 

[///]

Tony asked a question I cannooooo answer - as the RIMS and this style of mash come at loggerheads. So, why not give it a try.

I did see a RIMS system running a few weeks ago and was amazed at after 40 minutes the wort was still cloudy. Tony is this the same as your system.

scotty

ps. i have made an error. I forgot to include the 4th and 5th style of mashing. Decoction at #4 and RIMS at #5. No lesser a result, a different way to skin the ***** cat...

 

[Kai]

Reading thru the pages I think a few points are misguided some. Such as why do we wet the grain with foundation water? We do this as at the ranges of 60-72C the starches liquify in the malted barley. With this liquification the enzymes then cleave the long chain starches into sugars. Also, the topic of 'undermodified' malt. What is undermodification?? This is an incomplete processing of the malt by the maltster due to the inherent chemical composition of the malt. Is the malt we buy now 'undermodified'? Well I'd like to see a spec sheet, cos' after having sold Weyermann Malt for a number of years with Dave Cryer I never once saw a spec sheet that indicated anything less than complete modification by the WK index. I'd really like to turn this into a myth buster episode, but that said this is not the subject of the thread. All I will say is that if you think Weyermann would let out poor quality malt that requires a huge amount of time and energy to complete thier work by the brewer, your crazy. Weyermann is a quality based supplier. As Chris Garret from Warminster Malt once said to me, <insert lovelly English accent> 'if any Malster worth his chops in these modern times lets out undermodified malt into the market and makes more work for the brewer, then they should call themselves a stock-feed supplier not malster'.

I didn't say weyermann malt was undermodified, I said weyermann bohemian pilsner malt is purported to be less modified.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

This is a lovely thread - in it I can see the beginnings of so much homebrew "lore" and why many times the "lore" seems to be either self contradictory, debatable or at least not matching people's real world experience.

What I mean is something like the "Short sparge time = low efficiency" thing. Despite being almost universally accepted as true, it often doesn't actually match up to many people's experience on their system, nor even to many commercial examples. But after reading this thread - it makes a lot of sense. If you are using a mashing method that more closely approximates a floating mash, ie course crush, deep mash/lauter tun etc, then that maxim is obviously true. And considering that in Australia we probably owe the vast majority of our brewing practical history to the English tradition... then it seems obvious that our common knowledge would have this system as its baseline.

Its when you choose one of the other methods for skinning your cat - Rimms, Batch sparging, Thin bedded lauter tuns, BiaB, fine crush infusion, decoction etc etc etc - that things get confusing. They all have their own set of "lore" and when we try to apply the rules from one system to another, we frequently end up contradicting each other's "truths"

I strongly suspect that this sort of thing is where 75% of the argument threads here on AHB originate (the other 25% are because guys like me are smart alecs who like the sound of their own voices too much ) We all know that there are lots of different ways that people manage to squeeze a beer out of some barley and water - its just that deep down inside I think most of us harbour the thought that "their" method isn't as right as "our" method, so when we talk... we are constantly engaged in a low level argument who's aim is to nudge people closer and closer to doing it the way we do it.

This thread and specifically Scotty's post, should be a great reminder to all of us, that different isn't necessarily wrong and that right down to the tiny air bubbles inside a kernel of malt... the assumptions behind one method might be completely different to those of another, and that flows on to effect the whole wort production process.

Thanks to everyone who has posted to this thread so far. I've learned quite a bit about brewing and probably just as much about brewers in the last half an hour or so.

Cheers

Thirsty


PS - I do have a glass mash tun (or at least a quite clear plastic one) so I might be able to take some photos if I try this method out. Of course, It'll have to wait till I do a double batch, because otherwise I have a quite low and flat grain bed for getting a fast runoff (batch sparge) I can rig up for a fly sparge no problem, but I'll need double batch volumes to actually get anything to "float". And as I was just saying above, if I mix and match methods, It'll probably suck and certainly prove nothing. Eventually though, I'll get around to it and resurrect this thread with a few photos.

 

[Paul H]

Can you have a FMIAB (floating mash in a bag) & then "no-chill" it?

 

[warrenlw63]

Despite the multiple paragraph postings please appease the inner-***** in me and answer this question, which still has not really been answered.

Will it result in a better pint of beer in my hand at the end of the day in your average home setup? :unsure:

In other words if we did an identical recipe with a floury crush and batch sparge against a floating mash and protracted fly sparge would the end beer be any different to the discerning drinker in a blind taste test ????

Warren -

 

[Ross]

In other words if we did an identical recipe with a floury crush and batch sparge against a floating mash and protracted fly sparge would the end beer be any different to the discerning drinker in a blind taste test ????

Warren -

I would be very surprised if there was any discernable difference
a very interesting thread, but can't see me switching from a 20 minute batch sparge just yet.... B)

cheers ross

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Despite the multiple paragraph postings please appease the inner-***** in me and answer this question, which still has not really been answered.

Will it result in a better pint of beer in my hand at the end of the day in your average home setup? :unsure:

In other words if we did an identical recipe with a floury crush and batch sparge against a floating mash and protracted fly sparge would the end beer be any different to the discerning drinker in a blind taste test ????

Warren -

Its not supposed to - the whole point is not to make "better" beer. I thought that Scotty's post made that point rather well. There are a whole bunch of different ways to make beer, they all make good beer, but, depending on the mechanics of your particular system, perhaps one or other of the various techniques might give you a smoother/shorter/more consistent/less frustrating/more efficient etc etc brew day.

If you have a wide flat mashtun like me - floating mash makes no sense for you, but if you have a taller thinner mash tun, thats the territory of the floating mash, and if you aren't getting the consistency or smoothness of brewday that you would like, well here's a valid technique that despite going against some of the "accepted" wisdom, might sort out your problems. Of course if you have a tall grain bed and are experiencing no problems at all, why would you change? and why would anyone care if you don't?

You're fine... great. I'm fine.... great. But Joe Blow out there might have been having trouble, and now he has one more option that he might have had before this thread came along. Options are good.

TB

 

[bigholty]

Cheers to PoMo and /// (and others) for putting such effort into this post. It has really got me interested in this type of mash management, and it is always cool to get insight into what goes on in a commercial-scale brewery. I pretty much already mash this way, other than the coarseness of my crush. I usually start with a grist:liquor ratio of 1:2.5, I have a relatively deep mash-tun, and I fly sparge. Two of the main annoyances I have at the moment is mastering a fine crush on the Marga mill, and slow or stuck run-off. This method will let me run a coarser crush (which seems to work better on my mill) and to be content with a slow run-off and sparge. Once I set the valves on the HLT and tun, it's no difference to me if I go do something else for an extra hour. I will most certainly give this a go next time I brew.

The question I have though, is 'doesn't the grain sink once it becomes waterlogged after the mash?' And could you do do a floating mash without any kind of false bottom or manifold, etc?