Today I brewed my Kieran American Amber recipe (available in my recipe pulldown). As an experiment I tried conditioning my malt as outlined in the wiki: Malt Conditioning - Home Brewing Wiki
It was extremely easy, just add 3oz of water per 11lbs of grain. I used a spray bottle which has oz markings on the bottle. I gave a few sprays, tossed the grain, gave a few sprays, etc, until I had added 2.5oz for my 9.25lbs of grain. I kept my pound of crystal dry in case I needed to use it to clean any dough off my rollers. After I added the water I gave the grain an hour to sit and make sure the water was uniformly absorbed into the husks. Crush was no problem, no mess.
The benefits? I got incredibly fast runoff, and great lauter efficiency. I usually have a pretty slow first runnings and tolerable sparge runoff speed. Today it was all fast. I'll do this from now on, it was very easy. I can even tighten the gap on my crusher a little now and not worry about extracting anything nasty from the husk or getting a stuck sparge.
It was extremely easy, just add 3oz of water per 11lbs of grain. I used a spray bottle which has oz markings on the bottle. I gave a few sprays, tossed the grain, gave a few sprays, etc, until I had added 2.5oz for my 9.25lbs of grain. I kept my pound of crystal dry in case I needed to use it to clean any dough off my rollers. After I added the water I gave the grain an hour to sit and make sure the water was uniformly absorbed into the husks. Crush was no problem, no mess.
The benefits? I got incredibly fast runoff, and great lauter efficiency. I usually have a pretty slow first runnings and tolerable sparge runoff speed. Today it was all fast. I'll do this from now on, it was very easy. I can even tighten the gap on my crusher a little now and not worry about extracting anything nasty from the husk or getting a stuck sparge.