Using enzymes for mashing

[old mike]

I'll cop that since I love going OT. But Stu did give a serious answer. That's where the enzymes come from: hold the malted barley in water at around 65-68 degrees C and you'll get plenty of enzymatic action. That's why when you want to get sugar from other grains that don't have enzymes in them , it's often recommended you add them to a malted barley mash.

Enzymes can also be found at some brew stores, QED.

This is what I have been doing to date, I was looking at alternatives other than paying around $50 per 25kg for malted grain

 

[TimT]

What are you brewing with?

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, another method is chew and spit; human saliva has an enzyme that breaks down starch into sugar. Hence chicha, the corn beer, others mention. When you boil the wort it will kill off the bugs you've added to the beer.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

Would have been nice to get a serious answer for a serious question, but I guess it doesnt take much to get you guys OT on this forum

I was being serious. This is why bourbon makers use malted barley in their corn mash, it's the malted barley that provides the enzymes to convert the corn starch.

You can buy enzymes to add to the wort that helps break up the sugar chains to allow the yeast to consume all the available sugar. These give you "Dry" beers, like Hahn Super Dry, Tooheys Extra Dry...etc.

Different enzymes do different things.

 

[Mardoo]

There are enzyme producers in Australia who make the enzymes the commercial brewers use, as well as for many other uses. You should be able to find them from a web search. One of their chemists came to a Melbourne Brewers meeting to talk about enzymes in brewing, but I can't remember the name of his company. Yob may remember.

 

[lukiferj]

I don't know if you've seen the episode of brew masters where they make chicha but you need to chew a fair amount. Not something you could do on your own.

 

[TimT]

Yes, apparently it takes hours. Stephen Harrod Buhner in his whacky but interesting book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers recommends it as a fun family activity. Everyone sits around, cracks jokes, spits....

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

This is what I have been doing to date, I was looking at alternatives other than paying around $50 per 25kg for malted grain

Thats a good price.

Is it going to be cheaper to buy unmalted good quality grain and seperate enzymes...

Sure, you can buy cheap stock feed, but will it give you what you want.

 

[lukiferj]

Ha ha family time.

"But dad, my teeth hurt"

"Shutup and spit"

 

[TimT]

Hey, that could be a good brew club meet. I'll bring the spit bucket....

 

[lukiferj]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcf8WUB33hg

 

[Rurik]

This is what I have been doing to date, I was looking at alternatives other than paying around $50 per 25kg for malted grain

As a major contributor to taking this off topic, I will add something use full as a way of making reparation. The reality is (well when I looked into it a few years ago) purchasing the enzyme's is not a cheap thing to do. I cannot remember the exact price but we did not get a lot of change out of $1k for two of the smallest bottles that could be brought. Not really that cheap when you look at it like that. Yes there are some reasons why you would use it rather then malt but that does not make it a cheap process, which is what I think you are after.

It has also been addressed in other places but there is more flavor in the malt for the process then what comes from the raw grain and these flavors contribute significantly to the wort that is made. Even if you process the wort further (under the right licensing conditions) after fermentation there is still flavors that carry across from the malt that wont be there in raw grain. If the flavor is not important because of the processing makes it super concentrated you would be better off just fermenting cane sugar. If you want some flavor but don't care for the subtleties you would still be better off using a blend of malted grain and cane sugar rather then mucking around with enzyme's. Having said that you can use un-malted adjuncts in fairly high proportions if used with the right sort of base malt.

What you need to remember is that beer or any other grain base beverage is more then the sum of the raw ingredients going into it. There is the process as well.

 

[Kodos]

It could be that you use 50-50 malted base malt with your unmalted barley?

This works.

Dry stout is (depending on recipe) about half pale malt, unmalted oats (usually rolled oats) and black roasted barley (again, not malted).

It came to be this way because breweries used to pay tax on how much malt they used. so to cut costs, they used high percentages of unmalted grains.

White Labs sells a range of enzymes, I'm sure many are available through home brew stores if you ask.

I know a brewer who made a batch of Chicha with enzymes, don't know what it cost, but it wasn't the $1000 mentioned previously (unless it was meant to be $1 per kg?). That could have been for enzymes in commercial quantities tho.

 

[Rurik]

This works.

Dry stout is (depending on recipe) about half pale malt, unmalted oats (usually rolled oats) and black roasted barley (again, not malted).

It came to be this way because breweries used to pay tax on how much malt they used. so to cut costs, they used high percentages of unmalted grains.

White Labs sells a range of enzymes, I'm sure many are available through home brew stores if you ask.

I know a brewer who made a batch of Chicha with enzymes, don't know what it cost, but it wasn't the $1000 mentioned previously (unless it was meant to be $1 per kg?). That could have been for enzymes in commercial quantities tho.

No these were quite expensive but they were for a specific function and the minimum buy was quite high. What price were they and what size vials? We had two 1l bottles for that price. A whitle lab vial is 35mls so you are looking at 28.5 units to be talking about the same volume which is going to be betweeen $10 and $20 per unit or $280 to $560 per L. It is not so cheap when you look at it like that.

So lets say the product is retailing for between $10 and $20 a vial and the enzyme needed for this application (WLN - 4300) has a dosing rate of 300-40mls per ton of adjunct. The price of the enzyme per brew (50mls or 2 vials per batch) is going to be between $20 and $40 for 25L of a standard 11p wort. So that is going to cost $25 -$45 to use unmalted grain in a brew. The OP is saying that a 25 Kg sack is costing $50 which could make the same volume & gravity of wort for $10. Trying to go the cheap path is not so cheap, the OP would be better off to go a blend of malt & grain but depending on what that is it can be a lot of frigging about.