Keeping a steady temerature while steeping.

I am going to try my first partial mash recipe soon and was wondering how you guys keep a steady temperature in your kettle while your grains steep for an hour or whatever is called for.


A trick I was told was to steep the kettle in the oven on warm setting. Unfortunately I have a oven that's lowest setting is 200 degrees...WAY TOO HOT!


Tips? Tricks? Bueller?


Thanks!

Realistically, so long as you keep it in the ballpark, it doesn't really matter terribly much if you lose a bit of temperature. When I steep, I get the water where I want it, chuck in the grains, and put a lid on the pot. Good enough for science.

When I do small batch stove top stuff, lid off on the smallest burner on low, holds temps pretty stable. Set a timer ever 15 minutes to check and give a stir.

pelipen said:

When I do small batch stove top stuff, lid off on the smallest burner on low, holds temps pretty stable. Set a timer ever 15 minutes to check and give a stir.

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Doing one gallon batches so this sounds good!

Technically with a partial mash you are mashing not steeping. They are similar but different.

I would go ahead and use the oven. Preheat to your target temperature, put in the pot, check and adjust the temperature, turn the oven off, then walk away for an hour.

The temperature should stay close to what you want. A few degrees of drop is not disastrous.

200 degrees is much closer to mash temp than 65 degrees (room temp). I would heat the oven to 155-160 then shut it off. I routinely use my oven that goes down to 170 and have never had a problem provided it's turned off during the mash. It's much better than constantly constantly checking at room temp.

TurkCowan said:

200 degrees is much closer to mash temp than 65 degrees (room temp). I would heat the oven to 155-160 then shut it off. I routinely use my oven that goes down to 170 and have never had a problem provided it's turned off during the mash. It's much better than constantly constantly checking at room temp.

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Sounds good. I'll try the oven then.



Stupid question....

Should I warm the water up to 160 on the stove first as well?

I want to apologize for my horrible spelling error in the title of this post. Using the iPad app sometimes has its disadvantages!

Preheat oven to 200F. When your grain bag is in and you have hit your mash temp, turn OFF oven and put kettle in oven. It will keep the temp as the oven will fall to 150 degrees or so just by opening it one time.

I also use the oven method. I usually end up turning the oven back on for about a minute each time I stir the mash. The oven loses a lot of heat when the door is open fully for a minute while stirring. I also started mashing with a smaller volume of mash water in order to reduce the weight of the mash, I was a bit worried how much the rack in the oven was bending. I then add the rest of the water volume (consider it sparge water if you like) to about190 degrees to help being up the mash-out temp when I move the pot back to the top of the stove. Still have full volume boil, but makes the pot easier to manage when moving the pot around between stove top and oven.

Kettle is in the oven now. I had to turn it back on 30 minutes in.