KPSquared
Well-Known Member
Ok, stumbled across this casually mentioned in a recent thread. . . seems hard to argue with. I'm going for it. Time is so short for me that saving an hour is revolutionary. . . Let me know what you think (Thanks for the info RM-MN)
If you feel the need to do the PID controlled recirculation you need to keep the bag off the element as direct contact will burn a hole. My point was that if your grains are milled fine, the time for conversion will be so short that the temperature drop will be so little that adding heat will be pointless. With my system I've found that conversion only takes about 3 minutes. I continue to mash for 10 minutes just to be sure that the beta amylase has time to complete. That's all.
The last batch I did took me 2 hours, ten minutes from starting to bring equipment up from the basement to having it all cleaned and put away except for the items that I washed and weren't quite dry yet. That included weighing and milling the grain. With a bigger heating unit I suspect that 2 hours would be possible. I did a no-chill so I didn't have to wait for the wort to cool, dumped the boiling hot liquid into the fermenter bucket and pitched when it cooled.
That kind of shoots a hole in the PID controller. I'm sorry.
Very few do a 10 minute mash because we've all been brought up on the necessity of a 60 minute mash. Once I heard about a 20 minute mash someone did, it piqued my interest and I had to try some things. The first was a 20 minute mash and behold, I got full conversion as evidenced by hitting the predicted OG. Then I got my hands on some iodine to test for conversion with the idea that I would test at dough in and again every 5 minutes until the iodine quit changing color. On the first sample I missed my 5 minute timing and tested at 7 minutes with no color change in the iodine. That led me to try again and this time I would be more careful about the time and sample every minute from dough in until the iodine quit changing color. By 3 minutes it was done. Being a bit sceptical, I let the mash sit until 10 minutes had gone by just in case and hit the projected OG again.
With only 10 minutes and using nearly the full volume of water there will be little temperature drop unless you are brewing where it is very cold. Even then, if your conversion is done in 3 minutes, that temperature drop would be moot. Please note that you can only be assured of full conversion so fast if your grains are milled very fine. Larger particles take longer to wet through and until that happens, conversion doesn't.