Anybody ever used wort as strike water?

My system is limited to about 16.5# of grain, so if I want to make a huge beer, I usually have to use about 3# DME to get up to target OG.

I know some people have done double mashes and then run mostly first runnings into the brewpot, but what about mashing 4# of grain to make up the gravity of the DME I would use, then use that wort as part of the strike water?

The one problem I can see with it is you're taking 4# and mashing them at a certain temperature to create a certain sugar profile in your wort. Then when you add this to the second mash, the new batch of enzymes will continue to work on the sugars from the first. This might result in more simple sugars in your final wort, which would result in higher fermentability and a lower OG. This may not be a bad thing when you're making a big beer.

Thoughts?

I think you may also have a problem with saturation point, being that your first runnings are already full of sugars and dissolved solids. But I'm no scientist.

khiddy said:

I think you may also have a problem with saturation point, being that your first runnings are already full of sugars and dissolved solids. But I'm no scientist.

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yes to this. would be a problem.

Do a search for 'reiterated mash'. Somebody did a bunch of research on pretty much what you want to do, and it seemed to work pretty decently what from I remember of reading it. You can get a lot of sugar dissolved into water.

Reiterated mashing was my first thought, also. You might consider a partigyle, where you make a big beer from the first runnings, then use the second runnings for a smaller session beer.

Reiterated mashing works, but it takes more effort to get the sugars to dissolve. Consider LME is around 1.450 and, at least for cane sugar, you can dissolve almost 260 grams in 100 ml of water.

Yeah, I doubt what I'm proposing would reach a saturation point, but are you saying that I should probably expect a lower efficiency for the second mash?

I don't really want to do partigyle because the whole point of this is I want to make a minimum of 5 gallons of big beer. I would hate to put tons of effort into making a huge beer and only have a case to save and age over the years.

I think augmenting with DME and cane sugar is totally reasonable. I wouldn't mess with reiterative mashing. I mean, it's TWO mashes back to back. That's a long day.

Have you thought about incremental feeding? I make a lot of big beers and have found its much easier to reach the correct FG this way. This doesnt answer your question but it might give you another line of thought.

I thought of a solution that would work for me. I could just have two simultaneous mashes going at once, using a lower water/grain ratio for each. Then have two lauter/sparges set up so that sparge water feeds into the first LT, which then sparges through the second LT, which drains into the brewpot. I'd have to pay attention to make sure nothing got stuck, but at least this way I'd have properly mashed grain, plus I'd actually come out at the end of the mash still needing a few gallons of sparge water to rinse it all through. I wouldn't expect to get full efficiency still, but I can't imagine it'd be terrible.

I've done the reiterative mash once before. The mash did take longer of course, but I had no problems with it. I liked it because I only had to do a 90 min. boil (pils malt) to get my target volume. My OG was 1.100. I can't remember how much grain I used, but I recall there was not a huge drop in my efficiency (normally ~80%). At the time, I did a little research and the solubility limit of maltose is NOT even close to being an issue, and after all, look at LME, that's dissolved. I didn't find any data on feedback inhibition of the amylases. I'll have to look for that again

This brew just celebrated it's first birthday and samples taste awesome. It is next in the que to go on tap. I'll probably do this again in the future.