beertroll
Well-Known Member
Today has been an interesting brew day. I'm in the midst of making a pale ale. When I started, I discovered my HLT thermometer is busted (reads 40 degrees all the time). So I heated my strike water in my boil kettle. Just as I'm mashing in, my mom calls; my dad got a flat tire on his way home with 50 bags of wood chips, and needs to unload the bags to fix the flat. I close up my cooler, jump in the car, and go help him with that.
I get back to my mash about 40 minutes later and discover the mash temperature is only about 130 degrees. I was already mashing a bit on the thin side, and I was worried about the amount of water it will take to bring the temp up, so I basically did a decoction instead; I drained the tun into a kettle, brought the wort up to 156-157 or so, and transferred it back into the tun. I let it sit like that for another 40 minutes or so.
I drained and batch sparged as normal, reasonably convinced that this batch is just going to be wonky. I don't really know how to test for proper conversion. I've tried the iodine test before, but I've never been able to read it. The wort itself looked a little different than what I'm used to seeing. Cloudier and less viscous, I guess. I grabbed a sample and tossed it in the fridge for a gravity reading. Once it had cooled down enough, I took a reading and plugged the gravity into Beersmith. Beersmith comes back with a mash efficiency of almost 87%! I usually get about 74-75% on the mash. It remains to be seen if the beer tastes right and what my total efficiency ends up being, but it seems to me like I got dramatically better conversion than I typically do.
My fear is that high quantities of unconverted starch can throw off a reading. Is that the case? If this is a genuine reading, perhaps I should start regularly doing a (smaller, shorter) protein rest in my mashes. If it were only a point or two, it wouldn't be worth the trouble, but 10+ points is a lot.
TLDR: Accidentally did a protein rest and decoction and appear to have improved my mash efficiency by over 10%.
I get back to my mash about 40 minutes later and discover the mash temperature is only about 130 degrees. I was already mashing a bit on the thin side, and I was worried about the amount of water it will take to bring the temp up, so I basically did a decoction instead; I drained the tun into a kettle, brought the wort up to 156-157 or so, and transferred it back into the tun. I let it sit like that for another 40 minutes or so.
I drained and batch sparged as normal, reasonably convinced that this batch is just going to be wonky. I don't really know how to test for proper conversion. I've tried the iodine test before, but I've never been able to read it. The wort itself looked a little different than what I'm used to seeing. Cloudier and less viscous, I guess. I grabbed a sample and tossed it in the fridge for a gravity reading. Once it had cooled down enough, I took a reading and plugged the gravity into Beersmith. Beersmith comes back with a mash efficiency of almost 87%! I usually get about 74-75% on the mash. It remains to be seen if the beer tastes right and what my total efficiency ends up being, but it seems to me like I got dramatically better conversion than I typically do.
My fear is that high quantities of unconverted starch can throw off a reading. Is that the case? If this is a genuine reading, perhaps I should start regularly doing a (smaller, shorter) protein rest in my mashes. If it were only a point or two, it wouldn't be worth the trouble, but 10+ points is a lot.
TLDR: Accidentally did a protein rest and decoction and appear to have improved my mash efficiency by over 10%.