Mashing Overnight

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Batz

Batz Brewery...Hand crafted beers from the 'Batcav
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I remember one of the guys here posting a message that he was mashing overnight.
Now I am doing an AG Friday (nightshift that night) overnight mashing sounds very appealing.
Could some give me a rundown on it? I use a rubbermaid 5 Gall. , and my mash will fill it to the top , how does temperture go? , do you need to raise the temperture in the morning or just sparge?
Thanks for the help
Batz
 
gday batz
jovial monk did the posting under ..mash times...how long do you mash.

breifly you get the strike temp right then cover the grain with styrofoam wrapped in plastic.leave o/night

next morn do a vienese decoction..run wort out and bring to boil in brew pot and pour back over the top of the grain bed.etc

cheers
big d
 
let all know how it goes batz.im keen to try this method down the track.
 
batz,
ive done this on the last 3 or 4 brews.
works a treat, but i have found out that the water to grain ratio has a bigger effect on the fermentation.
i filled my mash tun to the top with water to reduce head space.
this i've found creates a very fermentable wort.
very low final gravity. oh well bigger abv
the last one i only put in 3L per KG of grain
and its not fermenting as low.
mashing overnite is a great time saver.
i now do it quite often.

cheers
crackers
 
I generally use a 2L/K ratio, but then I am a dextrine hound! I also have 10L boiling water to hand: if I need to use this to raise the mashtemp a bit then I won't have a too thin mash. The yanks use 2qt/lb, works out to 2.4L/K, I think and I would hate to get much thinner than that.

Bigd, overnight mash procedure down pat, but wrap the mashtun, esp over the lid, with a blanket or two.

Jovial Monk
 
cheers jm.
reckon the neighbours may think im looney wrapping up the cooler considering our o/night temps are about 26 degrees plus. :unsure:
but this is one time saver i will use and reckon i will use the 2l/kg ratio.

cheers
big d B)
 
Ok so I have agreed to brew some beer for a work bash and w/ends are bloody flat out these days so I am thinking of alternatives. I am thinking of "mashing while at work". The plan will be to dough in at about 7:30am and finish it off at about 5:30pm when I get home.

I guess the question is: is anyone doing this on a regular basis with some advice? I am thinking of an APA, does this technique work better with different grain bills/styles, strike temps etc.

I assume that the long mash time will let the enzymes break down a lot of the more complex dextrins giving a drier brew. With an APA I think this will be ok as long as I dont go above 35IBU.

Probably look at mashing 2.5L/kg @ 68deg
insulate like hell.
Add some boiled water to get it back to 70deg
sparging and take it from there.

Any guru's on this?
 
Couple o pointers:

1) Make sure you hit your first infusion temps bang on : once you strike, do NOT add unboiled water to cool the mash... the longer resting period will give bacteria and other bugs ample time to invade your mash and sour your wort. Trust me. I lost 65 litres of stout wort to this problem.

2) I've never liked Viennese decoctions... they denature the enzymes and I've not seen them add anything as far as flavor is concerned. If you're going to bother with the hassle of decocting, do a traditional decoction with the grain to get the maltiness, higher gelatinization of starches, and raise your mash temp without additional infusions.

3) I don't like overnight mashing, but mashing at lunch time (I live close to work) is great! Very fermentable wort and it only sits about five or six hours rather than 8-12.
 
Ziggy-san said:
Couple o pointers:

1) Make sure you hit your first infusion temps bang on : once you strike, do NOT add unboiled water to cool the mash... the longer resting period will give bacteria and other bugs ample time to invade your mash

[post="70067"][/post]​

Highly unlikely in an overnight mash unless he was cooling his mash with toilet water. Even adding untreated water is no big deal. A combination of mash tun (particularly plastic ones) and crushed malt are a breeding ground for bacteria anyway. Mash doesn't sanitize the wort we'd have to say that boiling does.

Ziggy-san, you say you lost 65 litres of stout wort? This was obviously post-fermentation, if so I'd be pointing my finger somewhere other than the mash.


Ziggy-san said:
2) I've never liked Viennese decoctions... they denature the enzymes and I've not seen them add anything as far as flavor is concerned.
[post="70067"][/post]​


Can't see this as particularly being a problem either. I think Big-D may have been advocating the Viennese decotion (which I assume to be a liquid decotion) for mashout purposes only. Kind of handy to denature enzymes at this time anyway isn't it? :huh:

Warren -
 
Jovial_Monk said:
I generally use a 2L/K ratio, but then I am a dextrine hound!

Jovial Monk

JM,
If u are a Dextrine hound would adding more Carapils/Dextrine to the grain bill have a similar effect as mashing thick, ie, 2l/k ratio?

Just wondering as I was looking back over some old recipes I had done and the best beer I ever did was way back when I was I was still doing part mash's. The beer was a Bock and I used 1 tin of extract along with 1kg of Pale, 1kg of Vienna and 1kg of CARAPILS/DEXTRINE. Along with a little choc & cara wheat malt. From what I now know that should of been way way way toooooo much carapils btu it was tops.

STEPHEN
 
Sounds like a great thing to try...

I hope this isn't a dumb question, but why do you do a 'Vienese decoction' or bring the mash up to 70deg?

Is the purpose of this to mash out? If so, I would have thought that after a several hour long mash, another 30mins at a slightly higher temp before the sparge really wouldnt make much difference.
 
Hi Goat,
You are right most enzyme activity would have ceased over several hours.
One advantage I can see though would be that the sugar would be more "fluid" at higher temps probably giving an increased efficiency as it would sparge more readily.
Just a thought
Darren
 
Yep my thinking would be to get the temp up so the sugars are easy to sparge out like Darren said.

Will defeinately give this a shot, its all dependent on when the bloody yeast fires up. Will report back how it all goes.
 
JY,
Don't let the mash go for too long (>12 hrs) unless you you want some real "funk" in the beer.
I let one go from 4.00 in the arvo until 10.00 the next morning. The "larks vomit" smell never left that beer
cheers
Darren
 
Well I hope I don't end up with a bunch of larks vomit! Thinking I may buck the trend and mash thinner as water has a much greater capacity to absorb/hold heat than grain will. If I insulate well hopfully the temp drop will be not so bad.

Mash length will probably be 10hrs.
 
Warren -

No, actually, it was pre-fermentation. I tasted the wort in the morning from the tun and it was sour before it went into the kettle. I went ahead and fermented anyway just to see if I could salvage it, but it didn't work.

And, FYI, I stopped using water from the toilet after I saw my dog drinking out of it... I didn't want cooties... :blink:

You'd probably be surprised at the levels of various microbes in piping -- the water may come from a pure\purified\treated source, but the road it takes to your tap is far less controlled. I used to live in New York City (which has some VERY clean water and extremely strict regulation of water quality), and my water was AWFUL. It turned out that the 180 year-old building in which I lived had only had the pipes replaced once -- in 1927. 75 years of buildup was icky, to say the least.

I currently live in Mexico and any water that I leave standing around develops an incredible sulfobacter and acetobacter infection (I mean, you can smell this shit from about five meters away!). So... yes, it IS possible (and probable, actually) that unboiled water from old pipes, when mixed with a nearly perfect culturing medium and left overnight at ideal incubation temperatures will carry enough microbes to innoculate your wort.

As to the mash not sanitizing the wort, thats obvious! However, most people strike with water in the 75-90C range -- water that has, for all effective purposes, been sanitized (unless your water comes from an archaebacter laden hot-spring, in which case you've got other problems) and which will NOT add a large proportion of beer-unfriendly bacteria to your mash. Most of the microbes on malt don't adversely affect your wort anyway...

Liquid decoction: why? Why not just runoff into the kettle and start your sparge (batch or fly) with new water... at this point its extremely unlikely that there will be that many sugars left over for the enzymes to attack ANYWAY: its been mashing for 8+ hours! Just start your boil with 1st runnings, sparge and trim off an extra 30 minutes! This is about saving time, no?
 
Ziggy-san said:
3) I don't like overnight mashing, but mashing at lunch time (I live close to work) is great! Very fermentable wort and it only sits about five or six hours rather than 8-12.
[post="70067"][/post]​

Nick,
Your posts in this and other threads appear to make good sense, honed from experience. So tell me, what problems have you had from leaving your mash for twelve hours rather than six?
 
No Hijac Intended,
My mate mashes then sparges and leaves the wort sitting in his kettle for at least 15hrs (shift worker) before heating up again and boiling etc on a regular basis
.
I recon its pushing the limits, but he has never had a bad result, or as i can vouch a bad beer !
Onya dave :beerbang:
 
So... yes, it IS possible (and probable, actually) that unboiled water from old pipes, when mixed with a nearly perfect culturing medium and left overnight at ideal incubation temperatures will carry enough microbes to innoculate your wort.

Most of the microbes on malt don't adversely affect your wort anyway...


[post="70277"][/post]​
[/quote]




ZS, You ever visited a maltser?
Ever forgotten or been too lazy to clean a mash tun for a day? Ever smelled a pile of malt dumped into the mulch heap? The aroma is not what one would call, desirable!
I can assure you that unboiled sugars from a mash left for extended periods of time certainly does contain bacteria that will adversely affect you beer.
The malting process for pale coloured malts does not destroy beer spoilage/funky bacteria. It is just too cold.
Old pipes are likely to give metalic flavours rather than bacteria. After all "high quality" water, cold temps and absolute darkness are not condusive to bacterial growth
 
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