Help me understand the term "mash in"

I'm hoping someone can explain the term " mash in". I've been brewing for a while now and I thought I understood what it means. I've always thought it was the act of adding the water to the grain at the beginning of the mash in the mash tun. But as I was reading Mitch Steele's book about brewing IPA's, I read in the recipe section for DuganA where the brewer mashes in at 50 minutes. What? What's going on for 50 minutes before you add grain? "Mash in occurs at 50 minutes, rest at 20, vourlaf at 15" hopeing someone can explain this. Thanks!!

 

I think you read that like a hop schedule. It's a 50 min to total mash time so the beginning (mash-in) is at 50 min (50 min left to go), rest with 20 min left to go, vorlauff at 15 min left....yada, yada, yada.

......kapisch?

 

Think of it as a count down. total time is 50 minutes and the clock winds down from there!

 

Add the hot water at whatever temp to the grain. Let the grain and water sit 50 minutes. Then recirculate wort for 15 minutes. Finally transfer to your brew-pot and make your beer.

To "mash out" raise the temp from your mash in temp to whatever for however long then recirculate and transfer. Unless the recipe calls for a mash out skip it and just recirculate and brew.

 

That makes scence, thanks for the information. I am used to doing 60-90 minute mashes, I had never seen a recipe that was less than 60 min mash. That was throwing me off. Thank you once again for setting me straight!

 

The count down thing is obviously what's going on and who am I to argue with Mitch Steel, but I’ve only thought of mash schedules as counting up. Even in the wiki, the time count goes up. It makes sense for the boil to count down because of hop utilization, but not the mash.

 

Would you be surprised with my mashes that only last 30 minutes? Would you be amazed that I get in excess of 80% brewhouse efficiency doing a 30 minute mash? Would you believe that my attenuation tends to be well above the published attenuation range for the yeast nearly every time too?

What is so magical about the length of the mash? It isn't the time that it takes to convert the starches to sugars, as that process is quite fast. It's mostly a compensation for leaving the grain particles large enough that you can lauter and drain the tun and with those larger particles it takes more time to wet the particles and to leach the sugars back out. If you devised a way to lauter and drain with particles the size of flour, your mash time would be only about 10 minutes.

 

I'm sure that if people checked their mashes, they would find they get a negative starch test (no color change) at 30 minutes.