• Please visit and share your knowledge at our sister communities:
  • If you have not, please join our official Homebrewing Facebook Group!

    Homebrewing Facebook Group

A partial mash no boil.

Homebrew Talk

Help Support Homebrew Talk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

brent1769

Member
Joined
Jun 15, 2014
Messages
18
Reaction score
2
Just a curious question could you do a partial mash no boil.... Or more of a minimum boil?

Use small amount of water for specialty grain boil to get flavors and color.
Is dme and lme sterile?
If using corn sugar to increase volume. Could you use a small amount of water to boil like when using priming sugar.
I know it's a process of its own if it can be done more so to try to get different results and not a matter of cutting corners. Might just have to try and attempt it with a small 1-2.5 gallon batch.
 
DME and LME is often added to 'kit' brews (hopped cans of wort) without boiling, so must be sanitary enough without boiling (they won't be sterile though).

Grains MUST be boiled or pasteurised, they are covered in bacteria.

But, if you aren't going to boil (or only boil briefly), how will you extract bitterness from hops?
 
DME and LME is often added to 'kit' brews (hopped cans of wort) without boiling, so must be sanitary enough without boiling (they won't be sterile though).



Grains MUST be boiled or pasteurised, they are covered in bacteria.



But, if you aren't going to boil (or only boil briefly), how will you extract bitterness from hops?

I was thinking you could extract the bitterness of hops buy boiling in a quart of water or maybe a different amount than adding that water to the rest of the wort.
 
I don't really get why you'd want to do this -- boiling liquid for an hour seems pretty easy. If you're using hops rather than something like gruit for bittering, the closer to a full boil you can get the better, since hops utilization goes down the less water you use.


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew
 
I don't really get why you'd want to do this -- boiling liquid for an hour seems pretty easy. If you're using hops rather than something like gruit for bittering, the closer to a full boil you can get the better, since hops utilization goes down the less water you use.


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew


It would be purely for for trying to change taste get a different end result.
Think of it like bread.
Fresh out of the bag taste one way
Toasted tastes another way.
Burnt tastes
different too.

Just thinking of different ways to get different flavors
 
When I bake bread, I know enough about how it works that I can alter the method or ingredients to achieve certain results. If I work fat into the dough, then use just a bit of liquid, I know the fat helps separate the starch particles from one another, and I haven't developed the gluten through working a moist dough, so I've made pastry. You manipulate the recipe based on the physical properties of the ingredients and the desired result. But if you try to change the recipe by replacing flour with cranberry sauce, or not turning on the oven, or leaving a whole stick of butter in the dough, you'll just end up with a mess. You're not considering the chemistry and physics of the recipe, you're just randomly varying it..
 
Hey, man. Because of the forum that you posted this in, I'm gonna come at you from the perspective of a fellow beginning brewer. Maybe you're more experienced than me, and maybe what I say won't totally apply. I don't know.

The way I feel, though, is that there're a lot of reasons that the common practices of homebrewing are the way they are. I may not have expertise on every one of those reasons, but they come from a lot of practice from a lot of people.

Does that mean that there's no room for experimentation, or that it's impossible that there's some creative ways to improve on current methods? Definitely not! However, I feel like it's a good idea to become really experienced with the standard ("satisfaction guaranteed" :p) way of brewing things before you tweak all the methods too much.

Coming from the perspective of an experienced cook, I'd say you want to have a good handle on why the average joe does what he does and why it works so well before you play around too much. You might stumble on some crazy cool results by just experimenting, but I think you're a lot more likely to be happy with your results if you tweak common methods with an educated perspective on how those experiments might change your results. You dig?

My totally beginner perspective here is that:

1. A thorough boil helps guarantee sanitation of your water and your extract
2. A thorough boil helps guarantee the complete mixing/dissolution of all the ingredients in your wort
3. Boiling with a large volume helps you extract a lot of alpha acids from your hops without either having to buy tons of hops or possibly completely saturating your smaller volume boil with acids with less total flavor than you need for the whole batch

Some of these ideas might be misguided or amateur, and I might be missing some other fine points too. But that's where my ideas stand so far, and I'm not confident enough yet to tool around with them too much. I suggest you get really comfortable with brewing first too. :mug:
 
There are folks who make a no boil beer. It's called Zoigl and it's brewed in communal breweries in eastern Bavaria. They do a triple decoction and the hops are in the mash from the beginning. After the last decoction they cool it and put it in their personal fermentors and when it's ready they put out a sign that looks like the star of David with it's 6 points. It's actually an old brewing sign with three points for the elements of earth, fire and water and the other three for ingredients malt, hops and water. I've brewed this beer but I did boil it for 5 minutes just to sanitize it. It came out very good as I took some to Germany and had the brewer there taste it and he gave me the thumbs up! So yes you can brew a no boil beer. However, I wouldn't try this until you have moved on to all grain as the decoction is a huge part of why this beer works.
 
When I bake bread, I know enough about how it works that I can alter the method or ingredients to achieve certain results. If I work fat into the dough, then use just a bit of liquid, I know the fat helps separate the starch particles from one another, and I haven't developed the gluten through working a moist dough, so I've made pastry. You manipulate the recipe based on the physical properties of the ingredients and the desired result. But if you try to change the recipe by replacing flour with cranberry sauce, or not turning on the oven, or leaving a whole stick of butter in the dough, you'll just end up with a mess. You're not considering the chemistry and physics of the recipe, you're just randomly varying it..


Actually I am considering the chemistry. Because mashing the grains converts starches to sugars which the yeast turns into alcohol. Basic knowledge. Boiling is to sanitize and extra the oils for hops. At no point does boiling do anything else! What boiling will do is Caramelize the sugars which will change color and taste. So I am thinking about the chemistry since heat changes the sugars which play a role in flavor.
 
Back
Top