Little baby mini-mash. With oats.

I'm converting this Blue Moon clone to extract. The sticky part is the oats (pun intended). How will I do that as easily as possible?

Suppose I want to do a mini-mash, partial mash, whatever it's called, with a pound of flaked oats & a pound of 2-row. I'll be cracking the 2-row with a rolling pin, because it's what I've got. Not too concerned about it effeciency, I'm mainly just wanting to get some of the enzymes out to help convert some oat starch. I'm upping the DME, so if (when) I don't get all the sugars out of the grains, my OG should hopefully still be good. If it looks too high at the end, I can compensate with some bottled water. By the way - since I'll probably still have some unconverted oat starch, a point or two of my OG will be unfermentable, and I should probably expect my FG to be a couple points higher than someone doing this in the "proper" fashion, right?

I'll be using muslin bags. I know the standard rule is a quart plus a cup of water per pound of grain. So, in this example, 2-1/2 quarts. Does the same rule apply with flaked oats? Won't they soak up a lot of that water? Make it 3 quarts, maybe? (This is my main question in all of this, although all thoughts & comments are welcome.)

Here's what I've got for total fermentables. The wheat DME I've got is 65% wheat, 35% light malt. I'm thinking this combination of ingredients should put me somewhere in the ballpark of the 50% malt, 40% wheat, 10% oats ratio that the original recipe calls for:

4 lbs wheat DME
1.5 lbs pilsen light DME
1 lb pilsener malt
1 lb flaked oats

Update

Thinking about it more, I decided that if I'm going to partial mash, I may as well try to do it right. So, I've adjusted the recipe to 3 lbs of pale 2-row, 1 lb of flaked oats and 3 lbs 11 oz of wheat DME. Instead of getting them from my LHBS (which doesn't have a mill), I've ordered them pre-milled.

Reading around, my question now is should I have ordered some 6-row for the benefit of the oats? Should I do a protein rest? Or should I just mash the 2-row and oats at 150-ish for an hour and don't worry about it?

pentachris said:

Reading around, my question now is should I have ordered some 6-row for the benefit of the oats? Should I do a protein rest? Or should I just mash the 2-row and oats at 150-ish for an hour and don't worry about it?

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The two-row will have adequate diastatic power to convert the oats. You don't need a protein rest. I'd go with 152 for an hour to 90 minutes (sometimes oats take a bit longer to fully convert) and that would do it.

Would there be an advantage here to using flaked/pre-gelatinized or instant oats here?

daksin said:

Would there be an advantage here to using flaked/pre-gelatinized or instant oats here?

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Yes, if they are flaked or instant (or Quaker's Quick Oats) they wouldn't have to be cooked before using so that's an advantage.

Cool, thanks. I'll shoot for 152 for 90 mins.

Did I seriously just hit something close to 80% efficiency?

I started my mash of 3 lbs pale malt & 1 lb flaked oats at 155. Strike temp for 6 quarts of water was 170, and I had to add a few splashes (maybe half a cup) of cool water to hit that 155 mark. Figuring that was close enough, I put the mash pot in a soft-side cooler. 90 minutes later, the temp was 151.

I drained that wort, and sparged with 6 quarts of water at 160 for 20 minutes. Drained that and squeezed out the bag.

The extract was 3 lbs 11 oz wheat DME (55% wheat, 45% barley).

I also threw in a grain bag of 1/2 lb flaked oats with 15 mins to go in the boil for body & mouth feel (how will that affect gravity?).

My OG was 1.056, with the final volume being right at 5 gals.

I'm not sure how much the boiled oats affect gravity, but to get that kind of OG with everything else, I'm thinking I had to be close to 80%!