Turbid mashing - is it black magic?

[seehuusen]

Hi all,

My strive to push my skills further in this great hobby of ours has led me to want to give Turbid mashing a go.

After reading about it in my "American Sour Beer" book, I felt like i had a pretty good grasp of the techinque. I even read through the Jim Liddil page on the subject.
Mike's temperature steps were 45, 58, 66, 72, 75 and sparge at 85 Celsius.
Twice, during the steps, an amount of wort was taken from the mash tun and heated to 85C in a separate vessel. This was later added a back into the mash to hit the 75C temp prior to sparging.
I fully understand why this is done, and is exactly why I am wanting to do this for my Lambic beer i am planning.

So far so good.
The references above even provide step by step explanations, volumes and temperatures. All good, IF you want to brew 19 litres... I don't...
So, I tried to find a calculator that'd sort me out... to no avail...
I'm not the kind that gives up easy, so I read up on the physics of heat transfer. Here the thermodynamic constant come into play, which is understandable.

After a fair bit of detective work, i figured i could use 2 formulas used by John Palmer, when doing multiple infusion steps. Seeing that this is pretty much what a turbid mash is, minus some wort/ mash volume removal steps.

Linky: http://howtobrew.com/book/section-3/the-methods-of-mashing/calculations-for-boiling-water-additions

Plugging all this into excel wasn't too difficult, but I now think there are either issues with using this logic, or Mike, Jim and in deed Cantillon apply black magic to get to a different addition volume...

If i go through the steps (at their values of 19L batch), having a 45C mashtun, mashed in at 0.6kg/l, to reach the next step of 58C, all i need to add is ~1.5L of boiling water, yet he adds 4L... that should take the mash temp to 69C... I've even confirmed this in Brew Smith. *which does not have a Turbid mash shedule functiom

How is the addition calculated?

Cheers in advance,
Martin

 

[seehuusen]

Forgot to ask...
Not too sure, but perhaps just ignore that really super low mash in ratio of 0.6L/Kg?
Thoughts?

 

[seehuusen]

By the lack of response i presume not many people have given this a shot, which is totally understandable.

I ended up doing a quadruple infusion mash in place of the turbid mash, but with so many prominent US brewries using turbid mash for their sour beers, i wasn't going to give up that easy (they must be doing it for a good reason, right?).
After even more digging around, i ended up contacting a few people and getting some answers, which in the end led me to get my calculations right for a 23l batch.

The starting water/grain ratio is only important in the sense that it affects the total amount of water required for the whole mash. A higher ratio leads to more water ultimately required when raising the temperatures, which in turn can eat into your sparge water "budget".

The water additions, when calculating, should take into account the heat dissipated during mash rest steps. This is, of course, dissipating at a rate specific to your system. It is also noteworthy that more heat dissipate during the initial mash steps, due to less inertia.

I've made a spreadsheet that i can use to calculate rough volumes required to raise the mash temperatures with boiling water. In practicality, I'll be using a thermometer to fine tune this to my system.

I'll be making a batch after the silly season is over, any questions or thoughts , please don't hesitate to post

Cheers,
Martin

 

[Mardoo]

Very interesting. Just read the BYO article. I look forward to hearing more.

 

[antiphile]

If you have Beersmith you could do it in there. Set it up as a decoction mash schedule, and just change the "Decoction Boil Temp" setting to 85.0C (on the mash page)

 

[idzy]

If you have Beersmith you could do it in there. Set it up as a decoction mash schedule, and just change the "Decoction Boil Temp" setting to 85.0C (on the mash page)

Agree with antiphile, Beersmith makes it very easy work.

 

[technobabble66]

Hey seehuusen, I just quickly went through the Mash Infusion/addition equation in the Linky you provided in your first post.
You can use that equation and set Tw as 85*c.

Btw, could you post a link about turbid mashing?

 

[seehuusen]

If you have Beersmith you could do it in there. Set it up as a decoction mash schedule, and just change the "Decoction Boil Temp" setting to 85.0C (on the mash page)

Great, I couldn't find anything to account for the volume removed from the main mash.
When removing 5 litres of wort, that would change the volume of the infusion required.
How do you get around that in Brew Smith?

Btw, could you post a link about turbid mashing?

Sure thing mate. It appears most are basing their technique off the Cantillon method, described here by jim Liddil
http://www.brewery.org/brewery/library/LmbicJL0696.html#Turbid

 

[seehuusen]

Here are my calculations by the way, step 8 is sparge with 85C hot water.
This is for a 23L batch.
There are some pretty good tutorials on how to calculate the pre-boil volume out there on the interwebs, but brew smith does the same job, based on my specific 3V brew setup and desired boil time of 3 hours.