Always clean your mash tun immediately after brewing

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JoshJoshua

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For anyone who is thinking about postponing your mash tun cleaning til a later day. DONT!!!

I got lazy after a late night of brewing and thought I'd leave the mash tun to clean another day. Well a couple days later I open to clean it and we have a quadruple imperial sour beer. Mold, decomposition, and alcohol are smells that are not meant to be mixed. Only left about a inch of grains in it and it turned into a mold party with about 3 cups of wort remaining.

So lesson learned always clean everything the day of brewing.

Now Im boiling multiple pots of water and scrubbing the smell away. After most of the smell is gone Ill be letting it set in starsans for a day and then boil some more water to finish cleaning and killing everything.
 
I tossed a large grain bag full of about 5-6 pounds of various (spent) grain right into my garbage can once. Didn't really think about putting it in a plastic bag or anything.

Went out several days later to toss in some more garbage (this was in the summer, so it was quite warm) and thought I was going to die when I opened the lid. Words cannot express how foul that smelled.
 
Yikes! Last September, I put my grains in a bag and put the bag into a bucket intending to bring it to the in-laws' place to put in their composter. That was some nasty stuff after a day or two.
 
I always spread my grains out on a plastic tarp in the garage and let them dry out for a couple days. The smell is great and once they dry up, they're easy to send out in the compost recycling.
 
just sling that **** out real thin across the grass, its gone in a day if you spread it out reall good. mow afterward if you feel the compultion
 
Somebody on this site once described decomposing spent grain, as a smell similar to human decomposition.

The most putrid smell will come up if you let mashed grains decompose near your home and don't just dump them in the local greenwaste pickup.. I'm sure they smell just as bad when dumped at the disposal site but at least that's not your home.

I dump spent grain in my compost pile and they stink to high heavan after a few days. Great part is. The stuff makes fantastic fertilizer/potting soil.
 
I feed my spent grains and used hops to my chickens not sure the nutrional value but the love them. Then they leave me a really compostable material.
 
Get some chickens. As long as you didn't hop directly in the mash tun, they will gobble that stuff up and be so much happier for it.
 
jgaepi said:
Get some chickens. As long as you didn't hop directly in the mash tun, they will gobble that stuff up and be so much happier for it.

I thought it was turkeys that gobbled, not chickens.
 
I got a 6' x6' open top compost pile, and if you spread the grains out on top the dry up without stinking too much. I can only imagine what they would smell like in a inclosed compost box or a trash can.

I agree with Dan. Great for the garden.
 
I always clean the mash tun right after sparging is done. I just dump them into a big pile in the woods behind my house then hose it out. I've got a good habit of cleaning everything as I'm done using it.
 
Normally I clean during the boil, but I was teaching a new home brewer about calculations and just moved the mash tun outside and forgot about then went to bed. But yes sealed in the tun for two days is a horrid smell. Never again.
 
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