starch conversion

When brewing all-grain, I've heard you normally heat your water to 170, add your grains and hope you hit around 150 degrees. Would it hurt your efficiency or taste to add the grains to the water around 100 degrees and slowly heat all of it up to 150-155? It seems like this would make it pretty easy to hit your temperature exactly.

Basically, is there a reason not to do this?

Thanks guys

I haven't done all grain yet, but have done a good bit of reading here.

In order to do this, you must directly heat your mash tun, that elminates a cooler as tun, and you lose the insulation associated with the cooler. So you must be direct heating a pot, which greatly increases the chance of scorching the grain and introducing nasty flavors to the wort.

You would have to pay extremely close attention and stir constantly in order not to overshoot your target temp and hurt your efficiency. You want to avoid hotspots throughout the mash. Then, you need to maintain the mash temp for an hour.

I'm sure some others will correct the mistakes I've made, but, then, I'll get to learn more too!

nickster51 said:

When brewing all-grain, I've heard you normally heat your water to 170, add your grains and hope you hit around 150 degrees. Would it hurt your efficiency or taste to add the grains to the water around 100 degrees and slowly heat all of it up to 150-155? It seems like this would make it pretty easy to hit your temperature exactly.

Basically, is there a reason not to do this?

Thanks guys

Click to expand...

Yes, you could do that, but what a PITA! Why not use Promash or something to just figure out how to hit your strike temp?

This:

Green Bay Rackers--Mash Calculators

Use it

If your system allows you to do this easily, go for it. But I recommend that you heat the strike water to at least 150-155 and then add the grain. The reason behind this is that you don’t have to heat as long (i.e. less stirring and also less protoelytic activity while you are heating through the protein rest range). You can hold the rest temp by wrapping the pot in blankets. I’m doing this most of the time these days and I like how easy it is to hit the mash temp exactly. Once the mash is done I transfer to my cooler for lautering.

When I was using a cooler for mashing I always disliked that I was stuck with the temp that I got after dough-in. For a while I would dough-in thicker at a lower temp and then use boiling water infusions to get me to my sacc rest temp. Although many make it work by aiming for a particular strike temp and then add the grain. I guess I could have invested effort into that approach as well.

I suggest give both approaches a try and stick with what works best for you and your equipment.

Kai

Keeping a gallon of two each of boiling and cold water will allow for quick adjustment, but I have never had a problem when using the calculators.

Promash works, too, although I have to modify my "thermal mass" (is that correct?) to 0.1 or it's a couple of degrees off.