MrsJones
Member
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2013
- Messages
- 15
- Reaction score
- 1
Hey everybody, I am kind of new to homebrewing and need your expertise.
My husband and I started our brewing venture recently, and we did so with all grain, 1 gallon batches. We discovered that 1) Our beer was delicious, really? :rockin: 2) We needed to make bigger batches so we could share more of this extraordinary hidden talent to the world. So, we decided to do a two gallon batch this time, an ESB. I feel like we didn't do it as well as we could have, though, and I wanted to ask a couple questions for people that know more of what they are doing.
We used a large grain bag and did the mashing in that. We mashed at 150 for an hour, then sparged with 170 water until we had the volume we needed. But.....we did not stir the grains within the bag during either process! (Had heard that squeezing them or messing with them too much would extract unwanted tannins, so I think we were a little paranoid and didn't give them enough water to flow through and get the inner grains. We did move the bag while it was mashing, though.) My question is this: How bad did we mess up by not doing this? Will our beer end up being less sweet than it should be? The other thing is, was our mash temperature too low? The more I read, the more I find that maybe the mash temperature should have maybe been 5-10 degrees higher?
Thanks so much in advance for your answers to both these questions. I appreciate this forum, been lurking for awhile and gathering info from everyone. It is cool to be able to post!!
Thanks,
MrsJones
My husband and I started our brewing venture recently, and we did so with all grain, 1 gallon batches. We discovered that 1) Our beer was delicious, really? :rockin: 2) We needed to make bigger batches so we could share more of this extraordinary hidden talent to the world. So, we decided to do a two gallon batch this time, an ESB. I feel like we didn't do it as well as we could have, though, and I wanted to ask a couple questions for people that know more of what they are doing.
We used a large grain bag and did the mashing in that. We mashed at 150 for an hour, then sparged with 170 water until we had the volume we needed. But.....we did not stir the grains within the bag during either process! (Had heard that squeezing them or messing with them too much would extract unwanted tannins, so I think we were a little paranoid and didn't give them enough water to flow through and get the inner grains. We did move the bag while it was mashing, though.) My question is this: How bad did we mess up by not doing this? Will our beer end up being less sweet than it should be? The other thing is, was our mash temperature too low? The more I read, the more I find that maybe the mash temperature should have maybe been 5-10 degrees higher?
Thanks so much in advance for your answers to both these questions. I appreciate this forum, been lurking for awhile and gathering info from everyone. It is cool to be able to post!!
Thanks,
MrsJones