bbbrew
Well-Known Member
So I came across this article that was written by the CABA (Canadian Amateur Brewing Association) back in 2006 which shows the distribution of cracked grain for the ideal mash (supposedly). That's might be a bit subjective based upon alot of things but ...
So here is what it looks like:
I didn't have the exact sieve size as they used about but I found 5 that were pretty close just to give this a try:
After this crack (0.063" opening in a two roller mill) I weighed the constituents and made this plot.
BTW, my X axis is reversed from the way they did it if you are comparing the initial image to this one so...
But what you see is that my husks are way higher (bigger than 2 mm) and the flour (small than 0.58 mm) is also high.
So I tried this again with a 0.050 opening and less husk material with some improvement to the 1 mm range. So I cracked the big stuff again (2 and 1.7) and then got this plot.
Which is still alot of large stuff and alot of fine powder. If I take out the 2 mm and above from the calculation it looks like this:
This is a good match as compared to the ideal but there is still alot of fine powder. Has anyone done this analysis and came up with different results using a 2 roller system? And if so, what would you recommend that I try before committing to a batch and find out that I really shouldn't have cracked so finely?
I have to say, that with a 0.063" opening, I usually get about 75% efficiency but If I could push this to 85% and still get a great quality finally product then I would. The 0.050" opening is not well liked by my mill as the passive roller didn't want to grab the Great Western 2Row very well. It took some proding to get it to go.
I did think about doing a double crack at 0.080" initially and then to 0.050" but ran out of time. So many interesting things associated with brewing.
Thanks,
BB
So here is what it looks like:
I didn't have the exact sieve size as they used about but I found 5 that were pretty close just to give this a try:
After this crack (0.063" opening in a two roller mill) I weighed the constituents and made this plot.
BTW, my X axis is reversed from the way they did it if you are comparing the initial image to this one so...
But what you see is that my husks are way higher (bigger than 2 mm) and the flour (small than 0.58 mm) is also high.
So I tried this again with a 0.050 opening and less husk material with some improvement to the 1 mm range. So I cracked the big stuff again (2 and 1.7) and then got this plot.
Which is still alot of large stuff and alot of fine powder. If I take out the 2 mm and above from the calculation it looks like this:
This is a good match as compared to the ideal but there is still alot of fine powder. Has anyone done this analysis and came up with different results using a 2 roller system? And if so, what would you recommend that I try before committing to a batch and find out that I really shouldn't have cracked so finely?
I have to say, that with a 0.063" opening, I usually get about 75% efficiency but If I could push this to 85% and still get a great quality finally product then I would. The 0.050" opening is not well liked by my mill as the passive roller didn't want to grab the Great Western 2Row very well. It took some proding to get it to go.
I did think about doing a double crack at 0.080" initially and then to 0.050" but ran out of time. So many interesting things associated with brewing.
Thanks,
BB
