Anyone stick their kettle in the oven?

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Johnnyhamer

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I'm new to grains and am wondering if any stovetop brewers do this. Seems like you could consistently keep the bash warm after you reach your temp on the stove.

Or is this just a terrible idea? Thanks
 
Some people do, but I've found that if you just get the water a few degrees higher than your mash temp, once you add your grains, and put the lid on, your mash temp will be fine for the 60 or 90 min mash.
 
Cool, much easier that way. I'm just mashing a gallon for a 2.5g partial grain batch so want it to keep the temp.
 
If your kettle is small enough, putting your oven at 150, and putting that in the oven is a great way to ensure it retains temp. My kettles are all too large for my oven though.
 
I've done it before. My oven only goes down to 170 so slightly high but it worked fine for me. I was doing a 3g steep with an extract recipe and after 30 mins in the oven my 150 water only 155, still ok for steeling. If your oven doesn't go down to 150-160 you might have an issue with only 1g but it's worth a try. Seems an easy thing to test too, just try it with only water and see what happens.
 
I have been doing partial mash BIAB in a 5G stainless stock pot.

I tried mashing on the stove with limited success. Every 20 minutes, I'd stir, check temperatures, and fire up the burner to bring the mash back up to temperature. I found the temperature dropped too quickly. Perhaps if the burner was turned down low enough, and the mash stirred often enough, the proper mash temperature could be maintained throughout, but I never tried this.

Then I tried wrapping the pot with a sleeping bag. That made it harder to check the temperature of the mash, and really difficult to use the stove to heat the mash back up to the desired temperature. While it held temperature much better than being in the open air on my stovetop, the mash temperature still dropped more than I was comfortable with.

Then I tried using my oven. Even though my oven's thermostat only goes down to 170 and has quite a wide delta between shutting off and turning back on, it held my mash to the desired 152 degrees quite well. I still, every 20 minutes, remove the pot, stir and check the temperature, and return the pot to the stove, but this seems to work the best of all the methods I've tried.

I've just recently converted an insulated water cooler into a mash tun, so I'm hoping I'll no longer need the oven for mashing.
 
It’s a good idea to check it with water to calibrate it. Temperature loss (or gain) is proportional to the temperature difference. The closer you can get it, the better it will work.

The temperature swing (hysteresis) of the air in the oven is enormous, on the order of ± 30 F °. Don’t panic, the high mass of the mash will integrate these swings nicely, you’re looking for the average. Just keep adjusting the oven until the water temp holds.

In my oven 175 ° F will hold the mash pretty much forever. At 200 ° F it will mash out in 3-4 hours. So it seems my calibration is off about 25 F ° at these temps.
 
I do this with every batch. I do partial mash 5gal, or all grain 2.5gal batches, so I heat my water to 166-170 depending on weight of grains, add them to the strainer bag, submerge, still like hell, lid it, and into my oven at 170.

I stir every 20 minutes, and after stir #2, I turn off the oven and let it cruise.

You can also probably hold the temp just by heating the oven to 180, and turning it off when you put the kettle in the oven, between the heat of the oven and the pot, it'll hold.

I use a 8qt pot to mash in, and a 20qt to boil, that way I can dunk sparge in the same pot I mash in after I dump the wort off into the big pot (I boil water while mashing to account for the sparge water).
 
I do this 100% of the time - heat to oven at lowest setting, then turn it off when you put the wort in. Works perfectly.
 
I was doing this in my early PM days when I would just mash a small amount of grain in a regular stock put that I use for cooking. My method would be to get the mash up to the correct temp on the stovetop while preheating the oven to the lowest setting with the door cracked open. Once at mash temp, I'd put it in the oven and turn the oven off. The ambient temp of the oven would keep it stable without much heat loss. Then I'd turn the oven on about a half hour later for maybe a few minutes... just enough to get it warmed up a bit. Unless your oven can hold temps at around 150, you need to be careful not to have it running so much that it heats the mash up beyond the normal temps.
 
You guys don't need to open this up and stir it so much. With my cooler, I just mash in, stir it well, take a reading, if it's good, then i close it up, wrap it up, and leave it alone for 60 minutes. If you are doing this in the oven, I wouldn't worry about the temp at all, if it's right when you put it in.
 
I have been doing partial mash BIAB in a 5G stainless stock pot.

I tried mashing on the stove with limited success. Every 20 minutes, I'd stir, check temperatures, and fire up the burner to bring the mash back up to temperature. I found the temperature dropped too quickly. Perhaps if the burner was turned down low enough, and the mash stirred often enough, the proper mash temperature could be maintained throughout, but I never tried this.

Then I tried wrapping the pot with a sleeping bag. That made it harder to check the temperature of the mash, and really difficult to use the stove to heat the mash back up to the desired temperature. While it held temperature much better than being in the open air on my stovetop, the mash temperature still dropped more than I was comfortable with.

Then I tried using my oven. Even though my oven's thermostat only goes down to 170 and has quite a wide delta between shutting off and turning back on, it held my mash to the desired 152 degrees quite well. I still, every 20 minutes, remove the pot, stir and check the temperature, and return the pot to the stove, but this seems to work the best of all the methods I've tried.

I've just recently converted an insulated water cooler into a mash tun, so I'm hoping I'll no longer need the oven for mashing.

If your crush is fine enough for BIAB you don't need to stir at all during the mash nor do you need to constantly check the temperature during the mash as each time you remove the lid to check you lose heat. If your crush is fine it won't take 90 minutes for conversion either. Interested in an experiment? Get some iodine and do a starch test to see when conversion happens.

I did that conversion experiment with a mash. When I added the grains I stirred them in well and grabbed a sample which when the iodine was added turned blue, exactly as it should. My plan was to take a sample every 5 minutes until I no longer showed the blue color which would mean I had no starch left. Correct? I missed the first 5 minute sample and got it at 7 minutes. Dropped a drop of iodine and ...no color change at all, not a bit of blue. So, how long does it really take for a mash?
 
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