What happens if you mash at 57 deg?? Here's what happened this morning ...
Making a Foreign Export Stout. Got up at 6am to mash in. Heated my wash water to 77deg, added it to the tun and stirred in the grain to make sure there was no dough balls. Quick temp check before I put on the lid and wrap her up - but before I do this I better check my mash temp - WTF - its 57 deg!!
So what has gone wrong here? Well, I usually bank on losing 10deg between strike temp and mash temp, but a few things have changed.
1. I've just upgraded from a 19L rubbermaid to a 26L rubbermaid, which will have a higher thermal mass. Also, as it was damn cold last night even inside, it was probably at a temp of 10deg before I added mash water.
2. This is a big beer, and grain bill weighs in at 7.2kg. So more thermal mass than normal. I also left the grain in the grain in the car overnight, so its at a temp of about 3deg.
3. It was 6am, since I'm on holidays I was only half awake, i could have misread the strike temp entirely.
Bottom line - with 7kg of grain and 20L of liquor, my tun is full to the brim, no room to add some boiling water to get the temp up higher. Nothing for it but to put the lid on, go back to bed, lets set the alarm for another 2 hours because I expect conversion (if there is any) will be pretty slow at this temp.
After 2 hours I took a sample, OG reads at 1.100 - pretty much what I would expect for a big beer like this. So I've drained the tun, sparged with another 15L of water, and now got the kettle boiling. So my question - does OG reading indicate that conversion has in fact occurred? If so, what would I expect from a mash at this low temp? Will it be highly attenuable because of low temp? Or should I use extra yeast? I've just bottled a batch of porter, and still got a load of slurry, so I can load her up if I need to. What to do? Anybody else had this problem?
Thanks for any advice.
hazard
Making a Foreign Export Stout. Got up at 6am to mash in. Heated my wash water to 77deg, added it to the tun and stirred in the grain to make sure there was no dough balls. Quick temp check before I put on the lid and wrap her up - but before I do this I better check my mash temp - WTF - its 57 deg!!
So what has gone wrong here? Well, I usually bank on losing 10deg between strike temp and mash temp, but a few things have changed.
1. I've just upgraded from a 19L rubbermaid to a 26L rubbermaid, which will have a higher thermal mass. Also, as it was damn cold last night even inside, it was probably at a temp of 10deg before I added mash water.
2. This is a big beer, and grain bill weighs in at 7.2kg. So more thermal mass than normal. I also left the grain in the grain in the car overnight, so its at a temp of about 3deg.
3. It was 6am, since I'm on holidays I was only half awake, i could have misread the strike temp entirely.
Bottom line - with 7kg of grain and 20L of liquor, my tun is full to the brim, no room to add some boiling water to get the temp up higher. Nothing for it but to put the lid on, go back to bed, lets set the alarm for another 2 hours because I expect conversion (if there is any) will be pretty slow at this temp.
After 2 hours I took a sample, OG reads at 1.100 - pretty much what I would expect for a big beer like this. So I've drained the tun, sparged with another 15L of water, and now got the kettle boiling. So my question - does OG reading indicate that conversion has in fact occurred? If so, what would I expect from a mash at this low temp? Will it be highly attenuable because of low temp? Or should I use extra yeast? I've just bottled a batch of porter, and still got a load of slurry, so I can load her up if I need to. What to do? Anybody else had this problem?
Thanks for any advice.
hazard