Beer recovery (just in case)

Here's my situation. I've been part mashing for an hour, and it seems like nothing is actually happening - my wort is not sweet despite holding it at temp this whole time...

I'm making a brown ale, but if I don't achieve conversion (I have work in 3 hours,) I've calculated this my beer is still within all of the guidelines for a brown ale by adding 250g Light DME (which is the base of my beer) to make up the sugars I didn't manage to convert.

Would it differ greatly enough to matter if the 500g of Crystal Malt I'm mashing was essentially steeped instead of converted?

Thats all specialty grain so you're not going to get much conversion. You need some base grains (2 row, etc) with diastatic power to get conversion

Damn crap. I didn't know this.

So what about steeping it and recovering the sugar content with my base malt?

RobWalker said:

Damn crap. I didn't know this.

So what about steeping it and recovering the sugar content with my base malt?

Click to expand...

That is what I would do at this point.

Strain out the grains and use that liquid to brew with the LME or DME.

B

Bang on, that's exactly what I'm doing. The boil is on now, hop schedule is going, all seems well to be honest.

How is this going to affect the beer exactly? Large change in flavour or can I just expect it to be slightly lighter in taste because of the extra light dry malt extract?

Crystal malts have already been converted during the kiln process (they are essentially mashed prior to being dried to the given darkness) so you basically just steeped them. Mashing crystal grains doesn't produce more sugar or flavor. It's just easier to dump them in the mash and deal with all the grains at once than mash and steep.

Ah, right...so essentially I'm not really far off what would be the result of correct mashing anyway?

You got it. you pretty much did correctly mash, just without base grains.

The fundamental difference between steeping and mashing is pretty minimal.

Interesting to know. There's some things the likes of beersmith don't cover I guess. Or it does and I didn't see it.

Thanks for the help. It's fermenting away now and the colour is good, the malt smell is much more noticable than my previous light brews too, so should be tasty