Androshen

Recipes 

"Heat 5 gallons of water to about 160-170 degrees and add bag with chips to pot. Add pectinase and amylase per manufacture’s directions. Chestnuts are really a fruit and the pectinase will create a much clearer end product by dissolving suspended pectins. Add water needed to fill brewing pot. Allow to soak 12-24 hours [24 is better]"


My big question is this .... does the temp need to maintained at 160-170 for that whole time?

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Gonoles10

Recipes 

Nope. I've had great success heating them to 150 the night before brew day and cranking it back up to 150 the next day. I wrap the mash tun in a thermal blanket for the night and the mash usually falls to about 120 for me.

Leeinwa

Recipes 

No. The enzyme activity will keep the pot warm enough. Like Gonoles says it will still be warm the next day.

leeinwa

celiacsurvivor

Recipes 

OK, I got my hands on some chestnuts and I'm going to try and give it a go this weekend.

I have a couple of questions before I start.

The chestnuts have been taken out of the green outer shell but are still in the brown casing does this have to be removed before roasting? should I crush/chip them before or after roasting?

The amylase that you are using, is it just alpha amylase or is it a mix of alpha beta and gluco?

Should I boil the chestnuts and water then reduce temp and add enzymes or just heat to the correct temp and then add them?

Thanks for your help

Colm

Leeinwa

Recipes 

Getting the fresh chestnuts is the easy part. I make beer out of chestnuts that are airdried in the shell for about a year. They are then ran through a shelling machine. To chip them, they have to be 12 -14 % moisture. They will be rock hard. I run them through and pre-crusher roller mill I made, to get them to a size that will feed through a stone burr mile that is set to give uniform chips. After chipping they are sieved to remove most of the fines. I then roast them in a special continuous stirring roaster I built that is propane heated. Light, medium or dark roast, Take your pick. THEN the are ready to use in beer. Tala!

Hope this helps

Skol

Leeinwa

Leeinwa

opm

Recipes 

G'day all.
I'm brand new to homebrewtalk.com and pretty much brand new to home brew as well (two brews a coopers pale ale and a coopers dark ale.)
my uncle owns a hobby farm with a couple hundred chestnut trees on it, so i've suddenly become the owner of about 9.5kg (20ish pounds) of fresh chestnuts.
after reading through this tread i thought giving chestnut beer a go would be a better option than throwing them out.
since they're fresh they're still fairly soft, so my plan was to use a food processor to chip/pulp them and then to oven roast them at a pretty low temp. (say 100C/210F) to help dry them out then take it up to 180-250C(350-480F) till they're browned up.
then following one of the recipes posted already.
any advise or comments??

opm

Recipes 

G'day again
bit of an up date.
i decided to do a small test batch.
-started with 1kg(2.2pounds) of fresh, off the tree, chest nuts.
-used a food processor to chip them to a pretty consistent size of 2-5mm
-layed them out on oven trays and dried for 30mins at 120C/250F and roasted them a 180C/360F for another 30mins (pulling them out every 10-15mins and mixing them)
-after removing as much of the chestnut shell as i could re-weighed at 0.375kg/0.83pounds
-put them in 3Lts/0.8Gal(US) of water at 150F
they've been soaking about 15hrs now. I'm bring the temp back up to 150F and i'll leave them at least another day. Took a hydro reading at 15hrs of about 1.012 adjusted for the temp its more like 1.017 it's currently a quite light brown (maybe a bit darker than a pale ale, but i expect it will clear a bit) and tastes surprisingly sweet.

celiacsurvivor

Recipes 

I managed to shell and roast about 4 1/4 lbs of chestnuts which I then soaked at in about 12L of water with 4mL of pullulanase, alpha amylase and beta glucanase at 70C for ~24hr, I kept it on the burner at low temp until I went to bed then I put it in the hot water cupboard on my beer warmer and wrapped in a blanket. Then the next day 4mL of amyloglucosidase was added.

I lautered and sparged it and ended up with 10.5L of wort at ~1.010.

I like experimenting so I decided to make 3 x 5L brews rather than one big one. I made a Lager, an IPA, and a brown ale. Sort of.

Here are the recipes.

IPA Recipe
3.5L of chestnut wort.
640g Dextrose
63g maltodextrin
12g fuggles (60min)
2g East Kent Goldings 4.8%(22min)
12g Cascades (22min)
¼ t irish moss (10min)
4g of fermentis safale S-04 ale yeast was rehydrated in ~1cup of water and added to the cooled wort.

The brown ale recipe was the same except I added 80g of Belgian candi sugar, and soaked 100g of dark roasted buckwheat malt in the wort prior to boiling.

Lgaer Recipe
3.5L of chestnut wort.
640g Dextrose
63g maltodextrin
9g Czech saaz 4.1% (60min)
9g saaz (20min)
5g saaz (10min)
5g saaz (end of boil
¼ t irish moss (10min)

5g of fermentis saflager S-23 lager yeast was rehydrated in ~1cup of water and added to the cooled wort. It’s now in the fridge at ~2C and bubbling nicely

I plan on racking to a secondary and dry hopping the lager with 5g of saaz.

The chestnut wort was nice and sweet, but the reading was a bit lower than I expected. I didn't grind the nuts very fine so I think that could be the problem. I have another 8kg of chestnuts to play with so the next batch will be ground finer.

Gonoles10

Recipes 

OPM,

Sounds promising! I've found that in order to get my gravity up there, I add honey. For a ten gallon batch (we knucklehead Americans are still using the imperial system, so don't ask me to convert it ), I have had good results using 20 pounds of chestnuts and 5 pounds of honey. That got me to around 1.045 starting gravity out of the boil kettle. It will finish a bit lower than you are used to, due to all the fermentables

Gonoles10

Recipes 

Survivorman,

Those recipes look good and tasty! It will be interesting to see the effect that a finer grind has on the sugar yield from the nuts and the starting gravity. It does seem low, but I am sure it will be good.