JLem

Recipes 

I'm interested in making something along the lines of Brandon O's graff. His recipe calls for steeping some specialty malts and using a couple pounds of DME in a gallon of water and then adding that to 4 gallons of apple juice. Now, I have nothing against steeping grains and DME, but I have this nice MLT sitting here and I was thinking I could just do a small mash instead. This got me thinking though that perhaps I could use the apple juice as my mash liquid. Of course this means I would end up boiling the juice, so the pectins would set, but I have some pectic enzyme so I'm not overly worried about that. I am however, worried about the mash pH. I assume that apple juice will have a lower pH than the water I use. Would I need to compensate for this? Anyone tried using something other than water in the mash?

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frazier

Recipes 

How about conducting an experiment - say, a cup of grains, some AJ, in a suitable small vessel. Do an iodine test after an hour. Post results here.

My guess is that no one has tried this, so you are the pathfinder.

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"Anything worth doing, is worth doing slowly." ~~ Mae West

JLem

Recipes 

Well, I'm not sure about being the pathfinder (is that like being the keymaster?) but I am probably going to give this a try. I'll report back.

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frazier

Recipes 

The problem I see with using AJ in this way is that it starts out with a SG of ~1.050, and it’s not clear to me how this will affect the solubility of the additional sugars from the grain. Also, the grains absorb liquid from the mash, which if you’re using AJ (instead of water) means you are losing sugar to the grains, at the same time you are trying to get sugar out of them.

So when you conduct your experiment, be sure to measure volume in, volume out, SG in, SG out.

__________________
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"Anything worth doing, is worth doing slowly." ~~ Mae West

JLem

Recipes 

I decided not to make the graff at this time...so the apple cider in the mash experiment will have to wait.

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Brewing blog at Brew by Brew