Should I crush specialty grains?

In John Palmer's How To Brew he mentions in the extract section that some specialty grains do not need to be milled before steeping.

When all grain brewing, i've been mixing up the grain bill, milling it, and mashing it all together. Is this correct or should i steep uncrushed specialty grains as well?

I've never seen where he said to not mill the grains- ALL the grains must be milled to be useful! They go into the mash with all the other grains.

Maybe he said specialty grains don't need to be mashed (they can be steeped for extract brewers)- but they definitely need to be crushed!

Definitely mill them. If you don't, you are going to need a lot more grain to extract the same amount of flavour (and to a lesser extent, colour) from the steep.

However flakes do not need to be milled, correct?

No, they don't. They will convert just fine as they are. You can mill them to increase the extract efficiency marginally, but it makes lautering more difficult (not worth it to most).

Not crushing grains just defeats the purpose of using the grains in the first place...

I read the book probably three months ago or so. I recall that he said they didn't need to be run through a grain mill, you could just crush them with a roller pin or beer bottle, or use a food processor.

His point was more that for all grain brews, the above methods won't work, you need a grain mill.

joety said:

I read the book probably three months ago or so. I recall that he said they didn't need to be run through a grain mill, you could just crush them with a roller pin or beer bottle, or use a food processor.

His point was more that for all grain brews, the above methods won't work, you need a grain mill.

Click to expand...

Well, sure you can. You can crush them however you want- but they still must be crushed/milled. The reason you don't do that for AG brewing is because while hand crushing 2 pounds of specialty grains isn't fun, it's more than a PITA for 12 pounds of grains!

for a pound or two, in a pinch, you could use a rolling pin. Not very efficient, and definitely not fun. But no way would I attempt it with more than 10 pounds.

I think he was also making the point that efficiency is not a big issue with specialty grains as well, as it's hard to control the crush with a roller pin, or at least, it would be for most of us.