low mash temps, problem?

So this was my first attempt at all grain since getting back from overseas....

I wanted to mash in at 152 for 60 minutes. I heated the water to 165 thinking that should offset my grain temp (11.5 lbs of grain) + heat my mash ton (coleman extreme). I was wrong. My temp was 144ish, so I heated an extra 2 gallons to 175 degrees and poured in into the mash 30 minutes after dough in. After the addition I hit 152 degrees and mashed for an additional 60 minutes.

A few questions, because I did this in stages is that going to affect my brew?

What is the best way to guess your dough in temp?

I got a gravity of 1.040 going into the kettle, so I think my ale will turn out ok, but I'd like to avoid this in the future. Thanks in advance!

Chris

I use this calculator to figure out what temp my strike water should be at
http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml

It seems to work pretty well. Keep in mind that this does not take into account heat absorption from your mash tun (I always pre-heat mine).

Regarding your other question, I don't know how your brew would be affected, but I don't think it should be a huge problem. It IS gonna be beer after all...

Sounds like you hit the conversion temp. You should be just fine.

With those temps you'll have a pretty fermentable beer which should end up pretty dry. So if it's a hoppy beer it will be really hoppy

Have you calibrated your thermometers? With my system, 1.25q/lb and an unheated coleman 165 strike would give me about 154 for mash in so you seem to be in the ballpark. A few degrees of error in your thermometer would mess you up.

GT

get some brewing software, plug in your #'s and it will tell you exactly what temp to heat your water to. I use Beer Tools cause Im on a mac and refuse to run a windows emulator or install vista on my machine, but alot of people here use Beersmith and Promash.

Also, I always pre-heat my tun with about a pint of boiling water for 10 minutes prior to dough in. This takes the heating of the tun out of the equation and allows you to only calculate the thermal difference between the grain and the water, both of which are easily measured. It's not as easy to measure the mass of your mash tun.

strat_thru_marshall said:

It's not as easy to measure the mass of your mash tun.

Click to expand...

If you got a bathroom scale step, on the scale by yourself then step on the scale with you holding the MLT. Subtract the two and you got the mass of the MLT. You only have to do it once.

Thanks everyone for the posts. I picked up a digital thermometer at menards for $15 on Sunday and I found an interesting iphone app called 'spare pal'. I think with those two things I shouldn't have to worry about missing my sparge temps again.

On a side note, I love reusing yeast! Saves money and i'm getting full krausen < 24 hours of pitching, before it usually took me 36 hours before I saw this serious of fermentation.