Estimated Efficiency?

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Reverend JC

2500 gallons year to date
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My brother and i have yet to purchase the 5 gallon cooler to make our mash/lauter tun. I dont think we will before we brew this weekend. We are Extract with steeping grains (1#) typically. This time we have 3# of grains. My question is can we mash in those little cloth bags? Soak at the different temps, 20 min or so at 150, 30 min or so at 160 and then open the bags and dump in 170 degree water right into the middle of them while holding them to give it a half-assed sparge. Or will doing it this way be fultile and we will still end up with the 40ish% efficiencey that one gets from steeping?


Thanks

Reverend
 
Reverend JC said:
My brother and i have yet to purchase the 5 gallon cooler to make our mash/lauter tun. I dont think we will before we brew this weekend. We are Extract with steeping grains (1#) typically. This time we have 3# of grains. My question is can we mash in those little cloth bags? Soak at the different temps, 20 min or so at 150, 30 min or so at 160 and then open the bags and dump in 170 degree water right into the middle of them while holding them to give it a half-assed sparge. Or will doing it this way be fultile and we will still end up with the 40ish% efficiencey that one gets from steeping?


Thanks

Reverend
Am I to assume you are doing a mini-mash? 3 pounds of grain is practically nothing for a five gallon batch. If that's all you are mashing (and not using any extract) then I'd say this may be a pretty weak-in-alcohol beer.
 
That is definately a plan and you will get better efficiency that just steeping. You won't get super efficiency, but it will be fine for the mini mash.

What are the grains? If you don't hae any base malt, this will be fine. Actually a half hour total is fine. If you do have 2-row or something that needs to be mashed, just keep it a whole hour at 154 then run the 170 water through it.

The bulk of your fermentables are still coming from extract, so efficiency isn't really a problem.
 
Bigger bag! See if your supplier has a bag around 18x36. I paid $14 for mine and it has greatly improved my mini-mashes. As well as making filtering blackberry seeds an non-issue.
 
I've begun to not use the bags and just do it in a separate pot. Add your 1qt/1# water and the grains and do your temp's and rests and dump it into a colandar/strainer. Then rinse it with some 170-ish water until it runs clear. Here's a photo:
4563-_MG_4460_600x400.jpg


The strainer is about 5bucks or so at Wal-Mart.
 
sweet, I saw that strainer at Target the other day for 6 bucks!!! thanks for the idea.

reverend
 

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